Assessing Assessment: the Multiple-Choice Exam, the Impromptu Essay, and the Portfolio

This week’s readings for Theories of Assessment trace the very recent (mostly because of its short history) interest in speculating how a reviewer should go about assessing student writing. The “reviewer” seems to also be a subject of controversy in these articles, as scholars debate whether or not educators, students, or test raters are best qualified to assess student writing. Nonetheless, it is clear that theories of assessment have changed dramatically in the span of twenty years this sample of articles portray and stability for assessment seems nowhere near being close at hand.

Huot begins with an introduction to writing assessment and its academic research as it was known and studied from about 1975-1990. In general, Huot’s work outlines the rise of direct writing assessment research during this time period and also briefly attempts to situate it alongside its counterpart—indirect writing assessment—which flourished until the mid-1960s. Describing indirect writing assessment as the evaluation of student writing ability based on “examinations on grammar and usage” devoid of critical review by “independent readers” (237), Huot goes on to list the three main procedures for direct writing assessment: primary trait, analytic, and holistic. Not surprisingly, the holistic procedure is named the most popular because of its cost-effectiveness (such as I suspect it still is today) even though Huot warns it is not always the most appropriate.

The bulk of Huot’s article then reviews three main interests for direct writing assessment research and argues for or against each interest’s findings, speculating where the future of writing assessment will progress into the future. Essentially, these three interests include topic development and task selection, text and writing quality, and influences on rater judgment of writing quality. For topic development and task selection, Huot concludes “structure, wording, and overall presentation of a writing assignment can sometimes have important consequences within particular writing contexts” (246) and also that very little has been done in exploring these influences. For text and writing quality, he suggests that recent (to 1990) findings in linguistics and discourse analysis has seen a shift from interest in syntax to interest in “global-level language features” (250), speculating that the future of writing quality assessment lies in the hands of future discourse-level research and interests. Finally, for influences on rater judgment of writing quality, Huot makes very interesting conclusions on the inconsistency of research and need for further study in the area. Though he does remark that a majority of the literature address “content and organization” (256) as important factors on rater judgment, Huot predicts that a rise in the popularity of portfolio writing will begin to change the way scholarship studies the influences on rater judgment of writing quality.

Following almost exactly where Huot leaves off, White takes us to the relative present-day understanding of assessment as it is understood through portfolio scoring. Drawing attention to faulty current interest in holistic scoring of student portfolios, White suggests a new (“Phase 2”) method of scoring portfolios that sounds to me quite similar to Huot’s identification of primary trait assessment. This method adds to the portfolio requirement a clear statement of goals for each sample of writing on the part of the faculty and a cover letter submitted on top of the portfolio that rhetorically argues why the student believes the portfolio attached meets or does not meet the aforementioned statement of goals. White believes this creates a beneficial, more practical, and cost-effective way for raters to not reevaluate work that has already been graded by faculty members but instead critique the student’s effectiveness in arguing and supporting through the cover letter that the portfolio completes the goals set of them.

Following Huot and White’s rather dense and informative articles, Royer and Gilles take us back to the 1990s with an enjoyable anecdote revealing another radical idea stemming from assessment theory: allowing students to choose their own course of action in placement for freshman writing classes. Called “directed self-placement,” Royer and Gilles suggest this method pleases every party involved (student, teacher, administrator, etc.) and puts the burden of assessing a student’s ability’s squarely in the hands of the student him/herself. Personally, I found the idea to be incredible. I think it could be potentially dangerous, though, to have no requirements distinguishing basic writing from typical freshman writing courses apart from a student’s choice. If a director could rhetorically convince students who need basic writing to enroll in those classes I very much see the benefits (a more relaxed sense of belonging in basic writing, a student’s feeling of personal endowment in the classroom, and the such); however, unless those students who we were certain needed basic instruction take it we may be toying with unstable young adult feelings.

The report of the NCTE on SAT and ACT writing tests provides an eye-opening (but really not surprising) account of the tests ineffectiveness in assessing student writing. Harkening back to Huot’s “early days of assessment,” the NCTE Task Force not only concludes that the SAT encourages superficial, formulaic, non-critical writing on its tests but also risks encouraging the same vapid writing in the writing classroom. The Task Force also found that these tests continue to influence conventional “correctness” as “good” writing, favor certain ethno-diverse groups over others, and influence placement in university programs which are in direct conflict with the test’s purpose of measuring student ability for college admission, not college performance.

White ends the week’s readings by rebutting NCTE’s attack on single-sitting essay writing and attempts to expose it as a means to support the “currently” popular portfolio assessment method taking up arms at universities that can afford it. Notice that White’s “rebuttal” comes in 1995 while the NCTE report on the “new and improved” SAT/ACT structure comes in 2005. It is clear the NCTE has stood firm on this issue for over a decade, and it is unfortunate that nobody seems to be listening. White argues again and again that the multiple-choice and single-sitting essay’s prevalence, cost-effectiveness, and ease of use in college assessment seem to point to the fact that they are the tools to use; however, I think it is in kindergarten when we learn that just because something is popular it doesn’t automatically make it right. White’s logic is dangerously faulty in this piece and seems to almost settle for essay writing since it’s better than multiple-choice tests and cheaper than portfolio assessment. I don’t agree with this argument at all, and I certainly hope that he is wrong. Portfolio writing may not be the best method of assessment, but it a step forward, not one or two steps back.

Reflection on Website Project & Final Website URL

URL: ceiwertz.pcriot.com (dead link)

Reflecting on the complete experience of creating a professional website, I have to admit it was a lot harder to do than I had initially thought. I explored many options on the tools available to both create and host the website. I started off exploring Dreamweaver, but since I had a program at home called iWeb on my mac computer, I decided to use iWeb for designing the site since I could use it without driving to school or downloading a trial version of the software.

I also explored a lot of different free web servers for hosting the finished product of my website, and after going through quite a few I came across x10hosting.com, which offers free web hosting and a lot of freedom in uploading and maintaining the website. I think they even offer free email accounts attached to your website if you want to sign up for them. Another feature I liked about x10hosting is that they can transfer seamlessly to another domain if you ever buy one, which I also looked into. Luckily, no one owns ceiwertz.com, so I could purchase it for a year for only $10, but I decided for now I’ll stick to the subdomain ceiwertz.pcriot.com, which is free, until the day I might be able to publish the website on … I don’t know … a university’s domain?

After securing a program for designing the site and the host server to publish the site, I think came the hardest part: creating the site from scratch. Outlining which pages to include, especially given that I am the one with least amount of experience teaching in our class, was difficult; however, I have to say the finished product is one I am really proud of and one I feel reflects my talents and goals well. I especially love how the site has become something I think I will continually use as a professional. All my work can be stored on the site as PDF, which is amazing since I usually have multiple areas where I’m storing papers and conference information and the such. And, my links page is a quick way for me to navigate the web how I choose, allowing me to remember to look into certain conferences or follow certain journals like the online edition of Computers and Composition, which cannot be obtained in hard copy.

As the project pertains to our readings this semester in class, I come back again and again to Sullivan’s “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing.” Sullivan argues that computers have changed what we must be and what we must be able to do as writers, specifically calling word processing as a writer an act of both writing and publishing. Like this article, publishing a website has made me realize that the act seems to not only change what I must do as a writer but also what I must do to be literate in today’s society. If I am to market myself as an academic professional—especially in composition rhetoric—I need to be able to compile my studies, CV, links, and the such in a website. If I do not have these tools in my tool belt, so to speak, I am not nearly as marketable as a professional who can.

I also think about how concerned we have been this semester about the composition classroom and writing as a skill versus an art. Beginning from scratch on this project, because I am by no means a talented website designer, reminds me that to reach the polished, finished project we must have both acquired a skill (which I did to some extend during the course of this project) and utilized our voice in artistically making a product our own creation. The same is true for writing. It is a skill and one that needs to acquire to some extent before making it their own. I suppose the question we have been seeking to answer this semester is what is more important, then, in a freshman writing classroom: acquiring a skill or developing the art. Perhaps that is a question that cannot be answered because every class will have different goals and different students, but I would hope that at the end of any semester we as writing teachers have taught that there is more to composition than technicalities, just as in the project of creating a website I have discovered there is much more to web design than web layout or web hosting.

WEBSITE!!

Here's the link to my website. The homepage is what needs the most work: I'm going to include a short bio where the jibberish is now and also going the have a professional picture where the picture of the lake is. Let me know what you all think!

http://ceiwertz.pcriot.com

The Fight for Freedom: Critical/Cultural Studies, the Writing Classroom, and Ethical Teaching in the University Context

The collection of readings for this week—grouped under the title Critical and Cultural Studies Pedagogy—expands the theories of CCS that Berlin touched on last week. Together, they examine the foundations, rise, and

Freire, writing in 1970, gives us our earliest sample for the week. Inspirational and steeped in thought-provoking theory, Freire’s piece gives shape to early foundations behind cultural studies by grounding it firmly in the notion of freedom. If an educator teaches methods for defining reality, then—Freire writes—“it is a courageous endeavor to demythologize reality, a process thought which men who had previously been submerged in reality begin to emerge in order to re-insert themselves into it with critical awareness” (621). Working with adult illiterates, Freire’s main goal is to examine and teach cultural literacy. His work outlines several tools and phases with which he implements this goal, but I believe his greatest accomplishment is situating cultural literacy (in this case that of Latin America) as work in both academic and equality.

Berlin, like Freire, also draws a link between instruction and enforced ideology. Writing now in 1988 (four years later than the article we read for class last week and eighteen years after Freire), Berlin classifies the teaching models of rhetoric into three different classes, each with a unique ideology on reality: cognitive, expressionistic, and social-epistemic

First, cognitive rhetoric defines “the real as the rational” (723). It divides writing into three stages: planning (further divided into generating, organizing, and goal setting); translating; and reviewing (both evaluating and revising). As such, cognitive rhetoric follows the theories of Flower and Hayes, Emig, and Bowel and Gintis. As Berlin suggests, it follows the epigram: “The existent, the good, and the possible are inscribed in the very nature of things as indisputable scientific facts, rather than being seen as humanly devised social constructions always remaining open to discussion” (725).

Second, expressionistic rhetoric argues that “the existent is located within the individual subject. While the reality of material, the social, and the linguistic are never denied, they are considered significant only insofar as they serve the needs of the individual” (726). Theorists within this class include Elbow, Lutz, and Murray.

Third, social-epistemic rhetoric, the most recent, is spearheaded by Burke, Bartholomae, Young, Bizzell, among many others. Within this camp, “the real is located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community … and the material conditions of existence” (730). Therefore, the real is never actually defined, but rather “posited” as “a product of the dialectic in which all three come together” (731-31). Chosen by Berlin as “the most worthy of emulation in the classroom” (735), social-epistemic rhetoric puts the question of ideology at the center of teaching writing and allows students to see the forces of society, culture, and self working within all writing.

Writing one year earlier than Berlin, Shor argues that Freirean notions of critical theory do not simply apply to the illiterate working classes of third-world countries but also have very important and extreme need to be implemented in thriving metropolises of America as well. Implementing dialogue as the key to unlocking critical literacy, Shor believes, instructs students in the quickest and most efficient manner. Through language, the “work” of the country becomes critical and critical thinking becomes much less remote.

Hairston, examining the current stage of writing as a discipline in 1992, portrays CCS with much different brush strokes than earlier scholars so far this week. Interestingly, she sees CCS at its core a method for instilling “dogma” and “ideology” (698) onto reluctant and resistant students. Ironically, the ideology which seeks to unmask hidden ideology instills and silences a resistant student’s ideology … I know that’s repetitive, but it seems to (comically) sum up the injustice to which Hairston points. Writing has become, in Hairston’s address, a product of its housing in English departments: critical theory. I was actually pretty shocked while reading Hairston at her extreme disregard for critical theory. Claims such as, “our society’s deep and tangled cultural conflicts can neither be explained nor resolved by simplistic ideological formulas” and “we have no business [as writing teachers] getting into areas where we may have passion and conviction but no scholarly base from which to operate” (705). Wow. Her whole distaste of critical/cultural studies makes complete sense; however, seems to completely turn the goals of the discipline upside down for scholars of rhetoric. She asks: What ever happened to trying to make students better writers? Why are we wasting our time teaching students in a writing class about sexism, structuralism, deconstruction? These, she argues, have no place in the writing classroom. She, it seems, leans a bit toward expressionism in agreeing that our classrooms are more diverse but need to be focused on the student first and then the student’s place within his or her community. I believe her argument is extremely relevant, especially to myself who at least as of late was a big proponent of CCS; however, it is still steeped in criticism and seems to just follow the same process of past expressionists who place emphasis on student writing, student experience—trying to detach the educator from focusing on the political and social constructs that line every piece of writing.

Smith, too, and as an excellent final note to the week, reconsiders CCS in the contemporary college. Writing in 1997, he is our latest example of writing in our sample and ends with very provocative questions on gatekeeping. Drawing attention to the fact that we as a discipline seem to steer clear away from the notion of gatekeeping, Smith brings to full-view the notion that scholars are always in contention within a university setting of gatekeeping: consider, as Smith does, graduation. Thus, Smith suggests it is best as scholar of writing to suit a course to the context of the university, where what is taught is of benefit to all majors and all students, not just those interested in composition. I believe what Smith would have us see is that teaching CCS in the writing classroom hinders students much more than it helps them. Just as Hairston critiques, we need to focus on teaching writing as discipline, not liberation.

Teaching Writing, Teaching Reality

The readings for this week—grouped under the title Theories of Pedagogy—ask questions about ways in which we teach composition. Which pedagogy is most effective? Are experimental methods useful? How can we classify these pedagogies? Do all theories need to apply to the classroom setting? Whatever the question asked of by each scholar this week, each study seeks to expand the field of composition studies by re-envisioning the composition classroom and the main elements (writer, reader, teacher, reality, and the such) that make it work.

We open with George Hillocks, who presents a massive meta-analysis of over 500 experimental studies of the composition classroom between 1963 and 1982. Utilizing the sophistication and scientifically tangible results of statistical analysis, Hillocks brings a great deal of credibility to experimental studies in the writing classroom. For example, Hillock classifies his 60 sample studies into different categories depending on such elements as the mode of instruction in the classroom and the focus of instruction in the classroom. Using these classifications, Hillocks proves that classrooms which create an environmental mode of teaching (which, among other things, promotes both peer and teacher feedback to work and direct instruction to clearly-outlined goals) perform better than those which implement a natural mode (where teacher is simple facilitator of positive feedback) or individualized mode (where instruction is done on an individual basis, mostly by tutors).

Furthermore, Hillock proves something that must have been rather shocking for his day and audience: when studying the focus of instruction, Hillock proves that classrooms that study grammar and mechanics perform nearly a third lower than classrooms that study no grammar and mechanics. Taking up these controversial topics in the early 80s, Hillock paves the way for more experimental research in theories of pedagogy in a time when many thought they were to a large extent a waste of time and energy.

Going even a few years before Hillock, we then turn to Berlin who, writing in 1982, outlines the major pedagogical theories of the time. Interestingly, Berlin supports a classification of pedagogical theories not interested in the emphasis of one element of the composing process over the other (e.g. writer, reader, reality) but rather by the way in which these elements are envisioned and how they are changed from one theory to the other. Not surprisingly, then, most of his classifications are based on philosophical interpretations of rhetoric: the dominant Current-Traditional Rhetoric and his reactionary Neo-Platonic, Neo-Aristotelian, and New Rhetorics.

These divisions are not so new to me, but as I became reacquainted with these schools of thought I was surprised to see how much my own philosophies on rhetoric have changed over the past five to seven years. I recall first being introduced with the New Rhetoric and being totally won over. But now I see major compositional problems with viewing a writer as creator of truth and audience as shaper of the writer’s universe. Instead, I keep being yanked back into reader-response and wonder as this theory does about the relation between writer and reader, or more importantly about communities. If the writer is actually at most times a reader who actualizes her own text as her audience must do after publication then this would not place the creation of truth inside the writer as New Rhetoric does but in the community, in the writer as a reader. But I digress; Berlin’s contribution to our list of readers this week is that studying different pedagogies does not merely mean we study different subject areas over others, it means we begin to be taught different theories of reality, different theories of truth.

Our final three readers bring theories of pedagogy into the current century with Breuch writing in 2002, Fulkerson in 2005, and Downs in 2007.

Breuch finds problems with the contemporary (negative) view of that post-process approach to teaching composition, that process theory is simply a call for the codification of writing steps which can be taught in the composition classroom. Specifically, she argues that post-process theory contributes to theories of pedagogy not as a concrete application to the classroom but rather as a redefinition of writing as "an activity rather than a body of knowledge” and that “communicative interactions with students [are] dialogic rather than monologic" (98-99). Her work suggests that studying theories of pedagogy goes beyond simply applying study to the classroom; her work suggests a reexamining of the definitions and players within that classroom itself.

Fulkerson and then Down and Wardle argue that writing has dramatically changed since the turn of the new century. Fulkerson supports that writing in college has become a topic of great argumentation among composition scholars since the boom of cultural studies hit the university. Down and Wardle argue that teaching writing in the new century has become an opportunity to teach writing as a legitimate discipline. They suggest, too, that writing in the new century has become a battle to support one method of thinking over another; however, this thinking envisions writing as a sect of scholarship with a rich and diverse history with much to add to study at the university aside from its function in preparing students for the writing they must complete while in college.

Proposal for: Composition 2.0: Erasing Authorship and Considering (for Real) Communal Writing

In the opening to their most recent specially-edited edition of Computers and Composition (Jan 2010), Michael Day, Randall McClure, and Mike Palmquist call for a new understanding of Web 2.0 and the Web 2.0 Movement. This vision, which they name Composition 2.0, realizes Web 2.0 as it has had drastic effects on the composition process, collaboration within composition, and participatory writing. Embracing hypertext composition for its advances in online collaboration, scholarship both in and beyond this edition have explored the influence collaboration has taken on the writer; however, very little if anything has been done to examine the influence Web 2.0 and collaborative computer-mediated composition has taken in blurring the lines between authorship and readership. Johndan Johnson-Eilola, in his groundbreaking work Nostalgic Angels, supports a deconstructionist view of hypertext composition. Using the foundations build by his study, a social understanding of hypertext composition begins to realize the internet as an actualized deconstruction of society in which borders are easily broken and the rules which govern its composition are continually being renewed and altered by even the most unassuming participant. From these foundations a stronger understanding of hypertext authorship can be understood as the product of collaborative communities rather than the product of an individual who can be constantly and limitlessly censored.

This paper will argue that a collaborative view of hypertext composition reveals new roles for traditionally defined players such as writer and reader, roles which easily become obfuscated and create social space where authorship becomes the product of collaboration.

As such, this paper will suggest new ways of viewing online composition. As influenced by Johnson-Eilola, it will suggest a strongly social view of online collaborative efforts such as blogs and wikis. It will begin with a brief introduction on current pessimism in hypertext studies and then suggest a social view of computer-mediated composition. This social view, as well as seeing an important and unmistakable obfuscation of author and reader, will open up discussion for potential ways in which Web 2.0 (or Composition 2.0) has pulled apart the writing process and allowed for writing in ways never before imagined.

Furthermore, it will be of benefit to those interested in the field of computers and composition, especially to scholars who are working to understand the impact of social networking sites and online collaborative efforts on composition. It will also be of interest to individuals who are interested in the impact continued social studies of the internet have on composition in general and those who either agree or disagree with the statement that the internet has changed permanently altered the way writing is done in communities.

Literacy and Community: The Ties that Bind in Literacy Theory

This week’s readings—or rather the readings for our last class that I switched up with the readings for this week—examine the influence of literacy on daily life, community, and profession. It seems clear from the readings that literacy studies is a crucial subfield of composition studies that asks questions just as much of scholarship as it does of society. Looking at the readings as a whole, it appears as though literacy studies calls for a reexamination of literacy, teaching on a community-by-community basis. Heath, Hull, and Cushman suggest that looking within the community’s complex literacies for the best solution to literacy-inspired problems will create better employees, better citizens, and a better understanding of the field of literacy studies as a whole. Brandt and McCarthy argue that locally based sponsors/teachers dramatically enhance/detract from the student’s learning of literacy and literacy abilities. On a community level, these teachers shape the literacy of their students and with it their abilities in composition as well.

As our earliest sampled theorist for the week, Shirley Brice Heath explores the “protean” or ever changing, complex task of assigning one stage of literacy to any one community. Using data collected from the community of Trackton, located in the Carolinas, between 1969-79, Heath explores the influence of literacy as it comes into contact with life from all angles, and concludes that literacy events and the literacies of communities exist in many forms that cannot easily be categorized on the scale developed by Goody for cataloguing a community somewhere between oral and literate. Rather, communities like Trackton—and arguably all communities—encounter different stages of literacy through different literacy events in different social transactions over time. As Heath states, "the nature of oral and written language and the interplay between them is ever shifting, and these changes both respond to and create shifts in the individual and social meaning of literacy" (466). So Heath’s contribution to literacy studies is not purely a call to view literacy events as varied event to event in each community, she also offers a call to understand that literacy events occur within a social context, one which shapes and creates meaning for both the individual and the community itself. Lucille McCarthy, who writes five years after Heath, suggests such a study could also apply to students whose many different communities are each class they take. Each must be examined and its literacy understood and learned separate from the other. Since each course may have different goals and objectives, it is difficult to gauge its placement on a literacy scale, just as it is difficult to place a community as described by Heath on a literacy scale.

I believe this is a very humble study that could easily be applied to prejudice for/against the literate/illiterate as defined by the scale Heath mentions as described by Goody. It is very important to not simply label a community by one or two literacy events but far more useful to examine, as Heath does, the interplay of literacy and orality within each community and perhaps the extent to which traditionally high-level literate communities exhibit oral activity and high-oral communities embrace literacy events. This is the very topic Ellen Cushman brings this very idea to fruition in her article where she defends the importance of the oft-neglected lower classes in policy making. Particularly looking to faculty members as potentially large contributors to policy change, Cushman argues that literacy studies gives weight to arguments made outside of the upper-class ranks of government.

Deborah Brandt, like Heath, sets out to view a historical understanding of literacy with fresh eyes. Outlining the rise and fall of apprenticeships at small, decentralized print shops of the American antebellum, Brandt concludes that like the sponsors of these programs, contemporary writing scholars "haul a lot of freight for the opportunity to teach writing" (183). Scholars, she suggests, must carry the burden of ideological influence of their teaching, especially that suggested from the classic argument from business employers that students who graduate college do not know how to write. Brandt hopes, in her final statement, that her work promotes an understand of composition not as a field which prepares its students for the job markets they wish to enter but rather as one which assists and studies individuals in their pursuit of literacy, and also of the literacy that pursues them.

Glynda Hull turns her study on literacy to the workplace. Investigating the current understanding of literacy in the workplace, Hull looks beyond the engendered stereotypes to see the potential for new understandings of workforce potential and literacy in the workplace. Interestingly, Hull suggests the benefits of an apprenticeship-style program may aid in instructing employees in the literacy of a particular workforce that may be simple to some but inaccessible to others. This reminds me greatly of the work I have done while at Starbucks Coffee Company, which is steeply entrenched in a literacy of its own making. I have had many opportunities to train new employees and have often found that the most learning comes from watching a skill in progress as a silent observer, learning about the skill, observing once again, and then attempting to carry out the skill. Just as Hull suggests workers cannot assumed to be fully-literate in their workplace without seriously rethinking the ways they are trained, teaching a new employee at Starbucks the entire culture of coffee as well as the company’s spin on this culture is a weighty process that works best when tailored to fit the person learning the material instead of the company or person teaching the material.

Composing on Computer: Discovering the Stakes of Compu-Writing

The readings for this week, grouped under the heading Computers and Writing, begin to discover the possibilities and limitations for composition done through emerging technologies. While some scholars see great potential in the methods of teaching and composition possible through the advent of the computer, others debate some very poignant warnings (perhaps evolutions of the same warnings scholars have always given toward writing) that computer-based and processed writing still engender language and embed fierce power struggles that may be overlooked at first glance. Still, computer writing appears to be here to stay and a few powerful programs have certainly overtaken our composition processes (McGee and Ericsson note that it is estimated about 80%-90% of word processing is done on Microsoft Word). As such, it is an important subfield of study and certainly worth more and deeper investigation.

Patricia Sullivan opens the week as our earliest featured scholar, which is perhaps not saying much since she publishes in 1991. Arguing that new developments in page-layout manipulations in word processing platforms have given great (and perhaps foreign) power to writers, Sullivan diagrams the ways in which computer writing has blurred the process method. The writer (notice the careful word choice here: writer, not author) traditionally has submitted text to a publisher and then with careful critique and revision, the publisher prints the final form of the text for the reader. Sullivan argues that with the implementation of word processing programs, the writer can manipulate text as traditionally only could a publisher. As such, the drafting process becomes obscured as writer now has more control over their text before submission to readers. Interestingly, I believe Sullivan’s argument could even be taken a step further. Perhaps the drafting process does become obscured through computer-based word processing, but if we see computer-based writing in its most organic form—hypertext—we can begin to see that computer-based writing also obscures the roles and identities of writer/reader. Who really is the writer of the text of a wiki? How do we define the writer of a blog comment, as reader or as writer? I didn’t read any of the optional articles on internet plagiarism by Purdy or Howard, but I suspect that they might also tend toward viewing hypertext composition (especially with the theories of Web 2.0) as a collaborative effort on behalf of writer and reader instead of the more traditional composing processes as described (and antiquated) by Sullivan.

Harris and Wambeam being to this week’s reading perhaps the most encouraging article for computer-based writing. Their work, “The Internet-Based Composition Classroom: A Study in Pedagogy,” describes and expounds upon a “pedagogical experiment” conducted in the spring semester of 2004. Working with complimentary syllabi, these two professors set out to test if teaching composition through an internet-based classroom would be more effective than not. Utilizing multiple cutting-edge, yet accessible and what sounds like pretty inexpensive, resources like MOO, the classes found some startling results. From a purely statistical standpoint, students in the internet-enriched classroom became significantly better writers from the start to the end of the semester while student in the controlled non-enriched classroom actually became marginally worse writers. Furthermore, students in the control significantly disagreed with the statement “I enjoy writing” by the end of the semester while students in the enriched classroom significantly agreed. Despite proving that students actually perform better in the enriched classroom, Harris and Wambeam make a compelling argument that the enriched classroom also creates students who are enthusiastic about writing.

McGee and Ericsson take a startling shift in tone from that of Harris and Wambeam. Their study on Microsoft and the development of its grammar checker (MSGC) open a whole new area of study but most importantly reveals hidden power struggles latent within computer-based composition. I immediately connected with this article because I have often thought—as I’m sure we all have—of the ineffectiveness of MSGC. It is startling that in comparison to the hundred of thousands of English teachers who teach grammar, MSGC influences tens of millions. It is depressing that so many of those who use MSGC cannot ignore shoddy suggestions and actually (as my little brother has) take its word over that of their teacher’s.

But I have to shed some positive light on this article (just as Mueller does with the digital underworld) and take us back to Sullivan. Yes, we are (as McGee and Ericsson claim) entrenched in MSGC and can never get around it as long as we compose on the computer; however, just as Sullivan urges the contemporary writer to become part publisher, I urge today’s writer to become part programmer. MSGC has an amazing feature within its settings that actually allows users to program suggestions into its algorithm. What this means is that we can manipulate what MSGC constantly monitors. I first discovered this when I took advanced composition as an undergraduate in a computer-enriched classroom. Someone has actually programmed MSGC as a monitor for sexist language. Every time I wrote “he,” a squiggly green line appeared and prompted me to change to “he or she.” So, yes, I must agree with Harris and Wambeam that MSGC does favor some and marginalize others, but the program is easily manipulated and must also be seen for its ability to aid a writer in monitoring any number of errors for which he (or she) wishes to watch.

Finally, and quickly since I already seem to be rambling, I chose to read Diehl, Grabill, and Hart-Davidson’s “Grassroots.” A compelling illustration of the social use of computer-based composition, these scholars recount the efforts of a program entitled Grassroots which is described as an “asset-based mapping tool” and its contribution to the conversation on knowledge work, analytical thinking requiring abstract reasoning. Essentially, I see this article as an example of how the Web 2.0 movement has obfuscated lines between writer and reader and created web programmers as “producers” of text in a more theatrical context—they are those who allow for text to be created but do not necessarily act as either reader or writer. It’s an incredibly thought-provoking article, but in its impact further proves that there is still so much more we can learn from the study of writing with computers.

De-Emasculating the Marginalized Voice

This week’s readings describe composition theory as the opportunity to explore marginalized voices in writing. In the words of Elizabeth Flynn, composition studies “demonstrate that the works produced by established authors are often the result of an extended, frequently enormously frustrating process and that creativity is an activity that results from experience and hard work rather than a mysterious gift reserved for the select few” (572). In essence, composition studies becomes a field which embraces these other voices since the goal is to understand and explore the composition process and its influences rather than produce an elite society and mystify the sacred and revered act of writing. This week, we are familiarized with the field’s interest in marginalized voices and the contribution they make not just to the larger study of composition itself but also to a better understanding of the experiences of marginalized academics in general.

As already mentioned, Flynn represents the feminist voice and envisions composition studies as an outlet for this marginalized voice in academic settings. By no means the first feminist, Flynn does, however, write at the earliest time among our sampling of seven scholars, 1988. At this time, as we have already studied, more and more developments were being made in the field and Flynn writes at a time when major changes and innovations were being made to composition studies. Among her ideas, I particularly was interested in the idea (reiterated by Culler) of reading as a woman. This process, which is admittedly difficult, is incredibly useful in that it seeks out the male-driven givens in our society, makes connections between facts and ideas that have been left unconnected by male-driven society, and empowers the individual female experience by using it as a tool to de-immaculate itself. I find this idea particularly interesting because it is one I continually use when critically reading. Trusting my own experience and intuitions has led me to great disagreements with academics or inspirations for papers. Whether or not I fit into the demographic of “white, middle-class male” is of unimportance. Reading from my own personal experience and perspective makes me an individual who can bring something to the discussion that no one else could. I feel like this—coupled with the importance of retrieving the female experience—is the heart of Flynn’s message and also Royster’s message in “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” She, like Flynn, advocates readers become alert and aware of voices which marginalize their own and argues we tune our own voices to become both “well-spoken” and “well-heard” (622).

Ritchie and Boardman also write on the marginalized feminine voice. Providing a brief history of the feminist voice from its emergence in the 70s to its explosion in the 90s, Ritchie and Boardman claim that while study of the feminist voice has flourished in the past years implementation of its study have not. “Many women still teach composition in the ‘basement,’” they write, “and the wider institutional, economic, and cultural conditions continue to create barriers against improving their status” (605). I find that this is still true today, over 11 years after Ritchie and Boardman write. But I agree with these scholars that feminism will do nothing but continue to improve our field and within the next 40 years there will be great changes even from now, to the point—I would not be surprised—that it dominates our study.

Villanueva opens the discussion of marginalization in composition studies up vastly with his work. By clearly asserting that we should not overlook concepts brought up by others due to racism or hatred, especially in his examples of the Latin Americas or Native Americans. His work reminds me of my first experience reading Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” So many of the concepts brought up in the novel are so foreign to me and I could not understand what they meant or why I was so drawn to them. Later I read the novel again in college in a literary theory class and realized that I was a marginalized voice in the novel, or rather the book was not written to my usually-heard voice of the white, middle-class man. It was much more playful, childlike, and awe-struck instead of commanding, authoritative, and direct. I loved it, and I completely agree with Villanueva in the assertion that discoveries like these are trademarks in becoming better scholars and better citizens.

Silva and also Zamel further explore the marginalize voice, but turn study to ESL students. From our sample, it seems as though the ESL student has had very little attention until very recently, Silva writing in 1993 and Zamel in 1995. This seems to be the hot topic of our current study, much like feminism was twenty to thirty years ago. The ESL student is completely lost in today’s systems of literacy, and even though it may be a long and hard right to reconcile with the student whose entire method of understanding and cultural givens differ from the traditional English voice of high literacy, the understanding that can come from this reconciliation holds major implications for the future of global communication, understanding, and knowledge. Suresh continues this point, arguing that there exist so many different voices left undiscovered, even within English. It will undoubtedly be a great contribution that composition studies will make to academia each time it considers and celebrates another marginalized voice; however, how long will it take before we finally realize that we all exist in plurality? Convention is the tie that keeps us together, but no one is ever fully exactly like the one beside him/her.

Annotated Bibliography!

Bromme, Rainer and Elmar Stahl, eds. Writing Hypertext and Learning: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches. Amsterdam: Pergamon, 2002.

Bromme and Stahl’s edited work is a fantastic and rich resource on the teaching and reception/learning of hypertext. The main purpose, as stated in the book’s introduction, is to give readers a general familiarity with what little has been said on the empirical and conceptual effects of learning hypertext. The collection of work that follows is a fierce collaboration of scholars who write on everything from the interference of linear and unlinear text, ideas of collaborative grading, the design (shape) of hypertext space, new ideas of authorship, to a new concept to me: hypervideo. For my research, the book is especially useful in chapters six and seven, where Karsten D. Wolf and A. Talamo and A. Fasulo write on the influence of hypertext on collaboration in the composition classroom.


Chakrabarti, Soumen. Mining the Web: Discovering Knowledge from Hypertext Data. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, 2003.

Essentially a users manual to the mechanics behind a useful web mining program or search engine, this book is all mathematic jargon and algorithm building for the web programmer save one final section at its end entitled “Profiles, Personalization, and Collaboration.” Web mining, defined as “the automatic discovery of interesting and valuable information from the Web” (vii), may be understood as the ultimate trailblazing of hypertext as it is the programmer’s duty to effectively weed out useless lexia while sorting and ranking useful lexia. What makes this section of Chakrabarti’s manual interesting my research is that he states in his final chapter “The Future of Web Mining” that “despite their increasing sophistication, the most popular Web search engines remain impersonal” 305). Pointing to collaborative context analysis as the solution, Chakrabarti prophesies collaborative efforts to be the future of hypertext trailblazing. The academic connection between teaching collaborative hypertext media and this envisioned future of search engines has yet to be made.



Hanrahan, Michael and Deborah L. Madsen, eds. Teaching Technology, Textuality: Approaches to New Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillon, 2006.

Michael and Madsen’s handbook to teaching “new media” (a synonym for anything essentially hypertext) is geared toward the teacher who is entrenched in high literacy and stands at edge with his/her students who seems to despite all his/her efforts to be “illiterate.” Complete with a glossary that defines “WWW” and “wiki,” the handbook might be evaluated as an experienced teacher’s guide to beginning hypertext theory. What I enjoy about this work is its subtle support for e-literacy and up-front explanation of secondary orality as the result of “inherited, interiorized” literacy (1). What will most likely make it into my research is the book’s understanding and solution for student aversion to collaborative methods in the writing classroom.



Hutchby, Ian. Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity P, 2001.

Hutchby is, like McLuhan was, interested in how hypertext not only changes the way we communicate but also changes the cultural meanings about which we communicate. This work traces such an argument through multiple communication technologies (e.g. telephone, videophone, internet conferencing, artificial intelligence systems, computerized expert systems), but is especially useful to my research as it pertains to computerized media in general. Hutchby makes a two-part claim. First, that society shapes the way it uses technology. He supports this with the triumph of social constructivism, which claimed that social process has influence over all area of technology. This is important to me because it essentially proves that collaboration shapes technological use. Second, and much more theoretically, he claims that technology shapes sociality. This is important for my interest in collaboration because it suggests that contemporary hypertext theories, which have their basis in collaboration, shape discourse communities that inherently disenfranchise some and privilege others. Collaboration, then, is a skill or marketable attribute that privileges a student over others who are unwilling, scared, or unable to collaborate.



Katz, Steven B. The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing. Carbondale, IL: U of Southern Illinois P, 1996.

I chose this work because of its smart-sounding title and use of the words “temporal dimension.” Just kidding. I did choose to include it, though, because it is one of the few examples (outside of Ong, of course) to utilize the term “secondary orality” to describe the renewed importance of sound for today’s writer. Katz provides many examples of implementing a vocal element into composition courses, but all involve physically speaking and having students speak their writing. This is important for my research because it once again highlights collaboration at the forefront of creating better writers in the contemporary classroom. In every scenario Katz presents as the implementation of secondary orality in the classroom, a student speaks in order to receive insight into the importance of sound in the written word and receives. The student, then, must collaboratively decide with and against other students the emotional and social meanings that lie beneath those sounds. Its an interesting pedagogical model, but once again places collaboration at the center of a contemporary composition classroom.


McLuhan, Marshall and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Wildly influential, I choose to include The Global Village mainly because I knew it would interest my work in one way or another and, further, because I have always wanted to read it. And I was right to choose it. An eerily accurate portrait of an America thirty years in the making, McLuhan and Powers’ work makes powerful assumptions based on the iconic tetrad used as a pedagogical tool to teach the ways in which media enhance, retrieve, reverse, or negate social processes. These assumptions paint the America of 2020 as a county overrun with right-minded (or right-hemisphered) “robots” who “instead of being captured by point-to-point linear attitudes, so helpful to the mathematician and accountant, most Americans will be able to tolerate many different thought systems at once” (86). For my research, the implications of teaching collaboration become that much more important. It means that instead of viewing collaboration as simply working together, we must realize that collaboration threatens the importance of the singular authority and values the work of the society over the work of the individual. McLuhan and Bruce seem to paint this as a negative change for society (changing us from “angles to robots”), but I argue it in fact—in the long run—is not.



Torrance, Mark, Luuk Van Waes, and David Galbraith, eds. Writing and Cognition: Research and Applications. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007.

This collection of work summarizes the cognitive movement and specifically views the cognitive changes that take place with changing writing technologies. The entire collection is divided into three sections that deal with a history of interaction with the writing process, the effects of writing on cognition, and the various writing media. My research can be influenced especially by the final section, specifically in the chapters “Learning by Hypertext Writing: Effects of Considering a Single Audience Versus Multiple Audiences on Knowledge Acquisition” and “Supporting Individual Views and Mutual Awareness in a Collaborative Writing Task.” These two chapters continue to ask questions considering the loss of personal authorship to community in hypertext-enriched classrooms and seeks to suggest that in certain circumstances collaborative efforts in fact benefit the individual as it benefits the group.


Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton P, 2005.
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1997.

I have not yet had a chance to read these two works (I'm picking them up from the library today ... they're on loan from California.) But I wanted to include them just because I know I will be including them in the rough draft of my final project.

Collaboration and Consensus: A New Social Hierarchy

Readings for this week call attention to writing as a collaborative process, dispelling myths of the writer as a genius in his tower above and separated from the society to which he writes. Our sample of six articles span from early theories on a writer’s relationship within his/her invoked discourse community (Ong) in 1975 to modern-day theories of composing as assemblage, remix, or design pattern over thirty years later (Johnson and Selber). Clearly, social theories of writing are still in great demand as writing technologies expand and scholars continue to examine the influence (and confines, as Porter suggests) of audience, collaboration, intertextuality, and intellectual property.

Ong publishes in 1975, and as a result is the earliest sample of social theory available this week. He argues that writers are successful when they create a fictitious audience for which to write. For example, though the novelist may at some times think of a specific type of person who might read his/her novels, he/she must create a population of readers that does not yet exist and write to them as if they already do. This also has implications for the act of reading, Ong explains, since to read in this model is to conform to the fictitious audience that has already been created by a writer. Interestingly, in this model of reading/writing the writer is author, powerful creator of discourse communities and trailblazer of new knowledge. What is problematic for me in this view of authorship is that it is assumed all readers will approach a writer in a similar way, not at least to mention that it assumes all readers will be trained to read in the same fashion and assume the same things when reading.

Ede and Lunsford also write in response to Ong and other early social theories. Claiming in 1984 that the acts of reading and writing and intertwined, these two scholars find similar problems with Ong’s notion of audience as that of “audience invoked.” Ede and Lunsford juxtapose this invoked notion of audience with its complete opposite, that of “audience addressed,” and find that both are able to be successful modes of understanding audiences but also have severe weaknesses. “Audience addressed,” for example, neglects the fluidity between the components of writing, as outlined by Mitchell and Taylor’s general model of writing: writer, written product, audience, and response. Rather that progressing in a cycle, the process of writing is more unlinear, chaotic. Any step of the process may influence or change any other step at any time. As to the notions of “audience invoked” supported by Ong’s research, Ede and Lunsford argue a writer must always be writing in some capacity to a real audience and can be viewed, then, as a product of that audience. Rhetoric as a tool helps the writer to know when to address/invoke an audience and to what degree.

Porter further entrenches the writer in his/her role as a product of an audience. Arguing that “according [to the view of intertextuality], authorial intention is less significant than social context; the writer is simply a part of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective meaning. Thus the intertext constrains writing” (35). But rather than wallow in text’s continual reference to more text, Porter suggests such an understanding gives a writer great power in writing for specific discourse communities. If in fact “readers, not writers, create discourse” (38), then a writer must guide a discourse community with the tools of that community if he/she is to be successful.

Bruffee (1984) and, later, Trimber (1989) both wrestle with implementing social theories of writing in the composition classroom. Bruffee first expounds on the importance of collaboration in teaching students the important relationship between conversation and thought: that thought is always related to social interaction. Teaching normal discourse (the discourse a student would use everyday) in a collaborative way opens up the opportunity for students to demonstrate abnormal discourse (which occurs when consensus no longer exists within a discourse community). But Bruffee ultimately claims that though collaboration is important, there is no recipe for its implementation in the classroom. Porter picks up two years later, suggesting (as noted above) that intertextuality suggests students be taught to write for specific, defined discourse communities to which they wish entrance. But Trimber responds three years later to criticisms against Porter and Bruffee, that consensus is totalitarian and collaboration focuses too heavily on discourse communities instead of knowledge structures. It is finally that Trimbur argues collaboration is effective not in conforming many voices into one but in making the students see that so many voices exist. In a sense, collaboration reveals consensus is not accommodation but conflict. Consensus leads to dissensus, a utopian notion that even though everyone does not agree a community can continue working toward solving its problems. This, trimbur asserts, is the benefit and needed element which collaboration (and consensus) teaches.

As a final scholar, Johnson-Eiola and Selber bring us twenty year later to the modern-day discussion of social theories of composition. As heated as ever, the debates over collaborative efforts of writing and consensus reveal major tensions between academic and legal functions of writing. Including problems of the theories of plagiarism and originality, Johnson and Selber suggest there remains little if anything in the world that is original. They purport: “What if the ‘final’ product a student produces—a text—is not concerned with original words or images on a page or screen but concerned primarily with assemblage of parts?” (380). This embrace with social theories of writing completely accepts assemblage (the using of unoriginal text and images in new contexts) as the breakdown of a tradition hierarchy in which originality reigns over borrowed content. The goal is to write well, not necessarily write originally. Assemblages, remixes, pattern language, design (architectural) patterns, and the like all help achieve this goal but must first be seen as legitimate. Certainly, such tools are much more accepted than they were thirty years ago when Ong wrote; however, much must still be done before a traditional hierarchy of originality is broken.

Writing as (Cognitive) Technology

This week's readings introduce the cognitive theory approach to writing. While the week’s scholars vary in opinion to the exact degree cognitive theory should have in altering the “current” approach to understanding the composition process of the 1980s, it is clear that these scholars are working to refine and expand upon the process theory described and developed by Elbow, Emig, and Sommers.

We begin with Ong’s revolutionary 1985 lecture “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” In it, Ong carries two critical tenants of the cognitive theory camp: first, that writing is technology, and second—perhaps more importantly for our purposes, that writing restructures thought. Comparing the technological, artificial act of writing to the organic, living act of speaking, Ong argues that writing is “imperious,” (19) “simply a thing, something to be manipulated, something inhuman, artificial, a manufactured product … foreign to human life” (21). The argument, he compares, to the one made in the 80s (and still today) against the technological advances of the computer—and I might add—the internet.

But a more pressing claim Ong makes for a cognitive approach to composition theory is that “technologies are artificial, but—paradoxically again—artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it” (24). It is here, then, that Ong suggests the master writers interiorize writing as a technology and exploit its abilities as a dead monument to paradoxically create something so poignantly human from the artificial.

Interestingly, I couldn’t help but notice our debate over whether composition is a skill (science) or an art came back up. Ong seems to be in favor of composition as an art, comparing it to a musical tool or a part of an orchestra. However, as Bizzell puts it later, Ong might be suggesting a two-part understanding of composition; it is both a skill and an art form. We can study and practice the skill and science of the technology; however, composition is artistic in that we must then apply our skill to rhetorically erasing the evidence of the technology from our written artifact and make it seems as if is natural, alive, human.

Flower and Hayes’s 1981 article develops more cognitive theory to Ong’s cultural observations on the oral-aural and the written word. It is clear from the start that Flower and Hayes are reacting from the inadequacies they feel are present in process theory. Rather, they suggest a process of cognitive processes in composition, which can be summed by their four key points: (1) that writing is a set of thinking processes orchestrates by the writer, (2) that these processes are hierarchical and related, (3) that writing itself is goal-directed, and (4) that writers create both high-level and sub-levels goals which may change as the writer learns during the act of writing.

The most interesting point I found Flower and Hayes made in this article is that of goal-making as “the keystone of the cognitive process theory” (286), “intimately connected with discovery” (287). It’s a little bit funny, but as I was reading this article I found myself tracing the unrecorded processes of my own writing. I often do carry out episodes when composing similar to the “write and regenerate” process described by Flower and Hayes: I tend to think and set goals for myself as if I were still writing, perhaps to keep a fluid voice throughout my writing process.

Goal-setting seems to me to be the most important part of the writing process; however, as Bizzell will bring up in her article, it seems to have been relegated to a subsection of the writing process for Flower and Hayes. But the claim that goal-setting and its connection to discovery should seem to be at the forefront of Flower and Hayes’s argument, as it is Bizzell’s 1982 article. She argues that composition studies must be influence both by cognitive theories but also by convention: “to help poor writers, then, we need to explain that their writing takes place within a community, and to explain what the community’s conventions are” (402). Bizzell suggests the best composition course would utilize an understanding of the inner-directed (cognitive/process) and outer-directed (product) theoretical schools to develop a synthesized method for understanding composition.

Our final three articles for the week are all modern implementations of the cognitive theory into the past decade (or so) and also seem to me to be reactions to Bizzell’s call for a synthesized theory where cognition is both inner-directed and outer-directed. Dias et al. expounds on ideas of a distributed cognition where—quoting Salomon “social and artifactual surrounds alleged to be ‘outside’ the individuals’ heads [are understood to be] not only sources of stimulation and guidance but … actually vehicles of thought” (qtd. on 136). Dias et al. then traces the influence of distributed cognition in the university, the work place, the Bank of Canada, and finally in genre analysis.

Kellogg’s 2008 article, the most recent of the six, claims that cognitive apprentice programs are a potential solution for poor writers during their adolescence who are moving through stages of knowledge-telling to knowledge-transforming to knowledge-crafting. As it stands, Kellogg argues, there is severe limitations in composition courses that constrain skill development. Creating better writers includes systematic (product) training as well as training that will allow students to utilize their “knowledge effectively during composition” (22).

Russell, too, seeks a theory of composition that is a synthesis of the more conventional cultural-historical activity theory of Engeström and the more cognitive theory of genre systems developed by Bazerman. This synthesis, Russell argues, is essential in understanding the mediation of writing across multiple fields of life and adds to cognitive theory by suggesting once again that composition does not take place within the vacuum of our minds but rather in the collective, distributed cognition of our multiple, specialized communities.

Product over Process

This week’s readings—encircled with the title product theories—takes a step back from our prior week’s readings on process theories to look at its counter-argument and why (especially as Americans) we have encapsulated composition studies in the evaluation of grammars and styles.

Connors outlines the history with which we have become all too familiar of this hundred-plus-years worth obsession with correctness; however, ends by pointing out that by the 60s composition courses were beginning to be reshaped by scholars who challenged the product over process theory. Hartwell continues that teaching grammar in the classroom improves students’ writing abilities. Interestingly, these theories directly contrast those we read about last week. And while it serves as no surprise (after all, we are reading about product over process) it seems as though more contemporary and especially early contemporary attempts to revolt against product theory simply based themselves around dispelling the notions product theory holds dear. In other words, product theory seems obsessed with two things: grammatical (conventional) correctness, and—as Butler describes—the imitation or adopting of the genius’s style.

Process theory, on the other hand, deeply stresses delaying the teaching of conventional and grammatical correctness in order to aid a student to find or develop a style or voice unique to him/herself. This especially seems to ring true in Elbow’s article, where the academic writing of students begins to be seen as a part of an anthology of writing students compose in and outside of the classroom—remember Elbow also contributed to last week’s series and I suspect he is a process theorist through and through.

The final two readings for the week—Sommers and Conners—then, are examples of the reactions we should take to the products of students writing. Interestingly, it serves to display that it is impossible to critique student writing without commenting on the conventional errors one might make in a final draft of a paper. However, I choose to side with the process theorists who choose to see student work (and all writing) as a work in progress, never finished.

This reminds me, again, of an experience I had while tutoring as an undergraduate in college. One particular student would continually schedule her appointments a half hour before her class when her papers would be due. I recall the director of the writing lab exclaiming that in such circumstances it would be best for a tutor to cut out the main part of the paper and focus on one section to improve instead of glancing over the entire paper and making last-minute superficial corrections to grammar. This, of course, would not teach the student anything. So, I continually did this for this student: I would focus on one section and suggest she come in earlier next time so we could look over the whole paper before it was due. Finally, she asked if I would just be a proper tutor and make corrections with a red pen on all the words misspelled and sentences that didn’t make any sense. I was a bit shocked but told her that I wasn’t that kind of tutor. Needless to say, she never scheduled an appointment with me again. I have to consider, especially after reading these articles, that we are indoctrinated into thinking from a very early age that writing grammatically is the best possible writing one can produce. We are taught to assimilate to the style of a genius and told that we must learn the rules of mechanics before we can break them. But do we ever get to really break them? I say no, and unfortunately I suspect that many others would agree with me. We certainly still live in the world where product triumphs over process, and I’m not entirely sure when that will change … but surely, it must.

Dissonance Paper

Choosing a topic of inquiry within composition studies for this course’s final research project is—personally—both a simple and difficult task. It is on the one hand simple because I have already developed a deep interest in composition studies, specifically in the possibilities of hypertext and new investigations of the global public sphere. It is because of this interest that I feel at ease picking a topic and trusting that I can adequately research and write on this topic. However, it is at the same time a difficult task because as this course has begun and continued new methods of inquiry and new topics within composition studies have sprung up and captured my interest. If anything, it will not be that I struggle to find a topic on which to study, it will be that I have too many. Therefore, this dissonance blog seems incredibly timely: it will serve as a means to flush out the many interests and methods of research I have become acquainted with over the past weeks and help solidify the one area and one question I hope to research further during the coming months.

First, when considering my past experience in composition studies, I cannot forget that my greatest passion is with Ong’s stages of literacy. As an undergraduate, my capstone project within the English department majoring in rhetoric and composition was to compose a forty-page paper on any subject of relevance to my major and which would display the sum of what I learned while attending college. The paper would be bound up with the three other students majoring in rhetoric and put on permanent display in a series of similar work done by all English students who ever attended my college at the school’s library. A trivial assignment, really, especially as an undergrad. But placed under that pressure, I chose for my topic Walter Ong and his age of secondary orality, eventually titling my final work “Wikitruth: The Post-Public Sphere in Ong’s Age of Secondary Orality.” In it, I explored the notion of omnilogue, where hypertext plays with language as it could be spoken from all voices, and began to suggest how Truth (as both a religious and logical notion) changes with contemporary methods from literary-bound dogma to an active presence available within the seemingly limitless lexia of connected hypermedia.

This thesis was, by far, the most scholarly project on which I’ve ever worked. I took deep cues from literary theory and especially the deconstructionists in claiming in my abstract that “we are fast approaching an age where closed dialogue is impossible, an age where the ideas of private and public are colliding unlike ever before, an age where even the methods of communicating through the written word are changing through impulsive and unlinear works of community-driven hypertext.”

But if there was one area over any that I would fault myself in this work it would be that it was too much theory and no substance. It energized me to commit to a profession in composition studies, but it was not a project that felt complete or was anything but the excited ravings of a twenty-one year old student who felt like he just stumbled upon the secret to the universe. Of course, that is kind of how I felt, but I had no support, only scholars I pitted against each other and their published essays. If I had the opportunity to revisit this paper I would build upon what I theorized and see it actively taking place in the world around us.

So this brings me to the current day. Where is there evidence that hypertext is building new reality which threatens the established truths of high literacy? Certainly online education is a prime example. So, too, is the site I’ve always had my eye on: wikipedia. There seems to be a lot of scoffing at the online encyclopedia that claims to allow anyone (or at least anyone who registers for the site) to edit any entry on any subject anywhere on the site. Pretty groundbreaking. There is no canon, no authority, no explicit structure, no author, no time limit, no page limit, no rules. All you need is internet access and a computer (which is available for free at any library), and you have the ability to define Truth in the age of secondary orality. But this seems too easy, too quick. If this is the subject I choose, which more and more I feel like it should be, it might be an analysis of the discourse of wikipedia’s site and their guidelines, as well as perhaps other sites like online educational sites. Or perhaps I could conduct a study on the threads of other contributors and see if any power struggles emerge from the posts they create and sustain or create and then lose.

Process over Product

This week's readings—aptly titled under the heading Process Theory—have my full support in being placed in Villanueva at the start, under the section entitled: “The Givens in Our Conversations: The Writing Process.”

Aside from Elbow and Lowe & Williams, all readings appear in this section for the week and all seven writers deal with a continued look at writing as process rather than product, specifically when teaching “unskilled” freshman writers.

Murray begins with a short, concise, and beautiful call for teaching writing as process and not product and ten implications that can arise from such a paradigm shift. Included in Murray’s implications are that the student will find his/her own subject, that all genres are fair game in the classroom, and—most importantly in my opinion—writing becomes a process of finding alternatives, never adhering to rules. For how short this essay is, I am struck with Murray’s eloquence and “voice,” as Elbow discusses later, throughout.

I have to admit I loved it so much I had to look up Murray on wikipedia, only to find one of his final quotes published five days before his death a few years ago: “Each time I sit down to write I don’t know if I can do it. The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can.” This is so true! Every time I sit down to start “committing” my thoughts into words, I am all at one terrified and exhilarated.

One point I especially find useful in Murray for the rest of this collection in process theory is the Three Stages of Writing. Particularly looking at prewriting, which Murray attributes about 85% of the writer’s time, there is a huge disconnect between what is judged in writing (product) and how to write (process).

Elbow picks up where Murray leaves off (to a point) and suggests a couple methods for teaching writing that will begin to embrace process, assuring that improving product will magnify itself when the students (as a classroom entity) is ready. The first, my pick of the two, “Writing as Producing a Specific Effect in the Reader,” integrates many characteristics of real-life writing into the classroom: it encourages writing for a tangible effect, writing for and within a community, writing that is generated and stimulated by the writer. One caveat I see in this method, however, is that many teachers will be hesitant in adopting this model because, even as Elbow states, it is an excellent model for teachers without conventional “English teacher” training. This is a slippery slope, and one Elbow is much less afraid of than I: if really anyone can sit in a teacher in this setting, why even hire PhDs? Why have class in a classroom? Why have teachers? Why have colleges? Can’t these students just meet on their own time if they are really that interested in improving their writing and clearly don’t benefit from having a teacher? I think obviously we can all agree this is preposterous since learning does not usually happen (especially for “unskilled” writers) in this manner. I don’t know if I would be quite as loose with these standards as Elbow. (Odd metaphor with “elbow” there, eh?)

Our next writer, Janet Emig, emphasizes writing as a process that develops into a heuristic, or method for learning. Interestingly, Emig—as does our next two writers—begins to see the implications of seeing writing as distinct from speaking as it pertains to learning. This is a distinction with which I am extremely interested and one I hope comes up more in the future. Emig’s major point in her article, however, is that the process of writing teaches us more about learning and incorporates multiple methods for understanding our actuality, both hemispheres of our brain, and—to paraphrase from Polanyi—“the person knowing what is being known.”

The next two articles in this week’s sequence provide more empirical studies on the process of writing. Perl significantly makes a contribution to the field by coding the entire process of composition. Studying five “unskilled” writers and coding their experience writing (both on paper and orally) finds that composing is not a linear process but one that continually starts and stops to revise, edit, and change itself. Interestingly, Sommer follows a similar study (coding the writing experiences of student writers) but also juxtaposes this with the coded experience of adult writers. Sommer also finds composition to not be as linear as many believe; however, she also remarks that adult (or “skilled”) writers break up their revision in order to preserve what Perl often finds “unskilled” writers loose: voice. One adult writer even mentions the revision process as similar to turning city-wide generators on and off: “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 generator, so I can make a deadline” (52).

Lowe and Williams end off this week’s reading by suggesting the blog can be an important tool in continuing to view composition as a process, specifically because it can be placed within many different social spaces outside of the academy and offers the student the opportunity to publish their work online. Interesting … do I send such motives latent within our own blogs?

REinventing REmedial

This week's reading gets to the heart of what it means to write, what it means to write well in the academy, and why there are so many students within our universities who are becoming disenfranchised from collegiate integrity: in a word, this week’s scholars attempt to define and redefine what it means to be remedial.

Shaughnessy begins by illustrating the inherent medical metaphors that proliferate composition instruction: that students who write poorly can be diagnosed and cured of remedial writing behaviors. Proposing instead four stages “of the teacher’s emotional energy” in the basic writing classroom, Shaughnessy begins to recast remediation through the eyes of the writing teacher and not on the student. Interestingly, these stages of teacher interaction with her students remind me of how a writing student might interact with his audience: guarding the tower, converting the natives, sounding the depths, and diving in. Just as we learn later from Rose the importance of audience in writing, Shaughnessy proposes that the best writing instructor is one who does not distance herself from her students. Rather, she learns to remediate herself and reconfigure her own thinking on the power dynamics of instruction to become a student herself.

Bartholomae and Rose continue this line of reimaginging the ways in which a professor views a remedial writing student. Bartholomae suggests that remedial students write “poorly” as a symptom of entering a discourse with which they are not familiar or writing without giving thought to what their audience might know and how they might respond to their writing. It is here that I believe we receive a great pearl of wisdom restated from Flower and Hayes, that writing is located “solely within the mind of the writer.” Just as art is the process and a painting is the product, writing is the hard part and text is merely its product.

Rose, too breaks apart modern notions of remedial by dispelling five incorrect assumptions implicit in university dialogue on remediation: that writing can be judged based on error, that writing is a skill, that students lack this skill, that the lack of this skill makes students illiterate, and that there will be a golden era in which this skill can be taught in secondary school. Furthermore, Rose dispels some of current comp studies’ remedies for remediation as cognitive reductionism, as remedies that help only to continue dichotomies of the gifted and ungifted, the learned and the unlearned. Such binary opposites, as we might remember from Derrida, generate power struggles.

Zwagerman and Goen-Salter provide some field support for this week’s readings. Goen-Salter outlines a program used in California that has completely radicalized the way a university deals with remedial writers. And Zwagerman’s illustration of the current state of university reaction to plagiarism suggests that we not only need to rethink what it means to plagiarize but what exactly plagiarism is. This reminds me of the advent of Web 2.0. What does plagiarism look like in an age where we can alter another’s text so easily? Check out this video I remember from a course I took a few years ago:



Interestingly, working with remedial students one-to-one is an experience with which I am pretty familiar. As a writing center tutor, I was constantly in dialogue with students who has varying command over the English language. Most were, as I think might be common in writing centers, ESL students who looked for a native-speaker to magically transform the most muddled parts of their papers from choppy sentence fragments to eloquent prose that oozed confidence and authority. At first, it was very simple to diagnose the ill-use of language in these student’s papers: don’t forget your articles, does this paragraph really support your thesis, a conclusion should be a snapshot of everything major you told in your paper with a little something extra to make us think.

But as I became more familiar with being a tutor and even gained regular appointments with the same students, I began to realize that they were in fact all cognitively aware of their subjects and could often speak with much more authority than they could write. I remember one student in particular whose paper I could not even believe was accepted in college. Her spelling was atrocious, she has very little command over her train of thought within her writing; however, when I met with her in person she stood by her topics and was completely unaware that anything could be wrong in her papers. She was surprisingly articulate and could easily organize arguments for her thesis when she spoke, but when she wrote became tripped up by her nerves and fear of making sentence-level mistakes. She was my most difficult student because at that time I had little tools in my toolbox to help her aside from going through her papers, sentence by sentence, and reorganizing, rethinking, rewriting every word. It was mind-numbing work, and I doubt it did much to help her.

If I was to instead have focused our energies on exploring the possible methods of writing available to her through prewriting or outlining or brainstorming or even bubble-mapping, she might have been able to better see how to persuasively organize her thoughts without the fear of the final draft. Following in the line of Rose, I had a teacher who once said that the hardest part of writing is to start. We are so obsessed with perfection that we forget writing is a process, and we even more often forget that writing is a social process: we peer-edit, yes, but more importantly we are writing to an audience.

I believe it is because of this teacher that I was so fed up with writer’s block one day I posted a large print-out of the words JUST WRITE above my computer.

Invention: The Rebirth of Rhetoric

This week’s readings, following the title Modern Rhetorical Theory, chronicles the period in collegiate history in which rhetorical invention died to streamline and standardize the composition process. Current-Traditional Rhetoric, as outline by Berlin, dominated this era—the eighteenth century and on into the major part of the nineteenth. Supplemented with Corbett’s introduction to classical rhetoric, we can see Berlin’s retelling of the age of Current-Traditional Rhetoric as a period of great loss for composition studies. It was a time when the most rigid, mundane, and superficial theories on composition were idolized for their ability to speak to all the new citizens of society post-Civil War who were now vying for the chance to become welcomed into the social and intellectual upper-class. Lauer outlines this time as one in which rhetorical invention ceased to exist in the composition curriculum, a time when Berlin agrees composition studies became the study of a fragmented argumentation, the logical and scientific yang to persuasion’s emotional and oral ying. Connors continues this historic retelling of modern rhetoric; however, gives a brief and valuable suggestion that by the late 1950s, composition studies were beginning to focus more on methods of exposition and thesis-driven texts than on the modes of discourse. This prefaces Kinneavy’s “Basic Aims of Discourse,” which further dissects the components and players of communication into modern roles each piece plays in understanding and classifying discourse.

What struck me first when reading this week was the unquestioned dominance Current-Traditional Rhetoric held for so long. Perhaps a mixture of lack of interest in composition studies and the heightened need to teach so many students at the same time, Current-Traditional Rhetoric single-handedly stunted the growth of compositional studies for over a hundred years. But I must say from personal experience this is not all that unbelievable. Teaching students is difficult and there are many factors which stand in the way of teaching effectively, everything from monetary to class-size, not to mention the fact that teaching composition is still seen as a trial-run for professors who wish to prove their worth before entering the more status-boosting realm of literary studies.

But even from a managerial perspective, one which Current-Traditional Rhetoric is all too familiar with, it is impossible to teach students all they need to learn about writing in a single year, when they are part of a class of over one hundred students. I felt this tension first-hand, just as a writing tutor, when given a half-hour or mere hour of time with a student who wished to revise (or prewrite and compose) a full-on term paper. Let alone the fact that it takes nearly half of the time given in a single session to read these papers, it was often tempting to simply add a few commas, fix a few splices, and superficially correct the paper and hand it back without giving two words of advice on how to actually write better. But the purpose of a tutor is to work in baby steps, and it was often more effective to pick out one or two areas within a paper to develop rather than to dot the student’s “I”s and cross their “T”s.

A similar point comes out of reading Lauer’s outline of the reinvigoration of the rhetorical cannon of rhetoric throughout the later half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Once scholars began to reimagine what could be done with writing and how it can influence study in many other areas, the possibilities for students became endless. Thankfully, it is no longer only thought that good writing is writing that is grammatically polished. Rather, good writing comes from most anywhere and anything; it is the critic’s job to find its social, psychological, hermeneutic, or epistemic place and the teacher’s job to cultivate such within his/her students.

With such a renewed sense of invention in writing, then, it seems odd that not much seems to have changed in the composition course since the reign of the Current-Traditionalists as evidenced in last week’s reading. Is it because the university is ahead of its time, and it is just a matter of time before the preparatory schools catch up? Or is it still a matter of money and class-size? Certainly, it is not a teacher’s fault that they are employed to instruct hundreds of students with no support or financial backing. But … then … whose fault is it?

A Little Bit of History

So, who knew? We’re all German. Well, at least academically.

This week, aptly titled Comp Studies Origins, gives varied scholarly insights as to the beginnings and brief (but complex!) history of contemporary comp studies, with a bit of looking to the future of comp theory on behalf of Yancey. I also was extremely grateful to Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt for what felt like a recap of a critical theory course. It’s important to see critical theory as an evolution, a dialogue, of thought and it was nice to once again but it (and comp studies) in that context.

Brereton gives us the most ancient of comp/rhet’s modern influence on the college scene. Linked up well with Hill’s primary address to secondary school teachers in 1898, An Answer to the Cry for More English, Brereton’s Introduction paints early twentieth-century comp as that all-too-familiar grammatical policeperson whose primary joy in life is to cut deep gashes into a student’s paper, making it drip red with ink. But what I found particularly interesting in Brereton’s outline of comp studies circa 1875-1925 were the fissures he claims began to develop between comp studies programs and other areas of the academy and beyond which till now I had understood developed much later. As an example, Brereton early on cites the transformation that overtakes the American college at this time (a move toward diversified specialization, intense research, and a departure from singularity in education) as the product of more and more scholars earning their degrees in Germany, thus adopting a German educational mindset. While I recall learning about the “baptizing” of American education in the waters of German structure, this event is one I had always seen as taking its deepest effects in English departments not until the 1950s, 1960s—right around open admissions, the GI Bill, and the infinite reactions to New Criticism. But after reading Brereton, it becomes clear that Germanized ideals of research and specialization were already developing in comp studies at this time, even if they were a bit harder to find.

Another topic which caught me off guard in Brereton was the brief discussion about whether or not rhet studies should be considered an art or a science. This is an important question I think we should still be asking ourselves today, because I feel too often we take for granted that the study of composition is a study of the arts. Yes: composition is undoubtedly artistic, and there is much to gain from teaching the skill at an elementary level. But I recall (uh-oh … allusion time) a time when I was an upperclassman at my undergraduate college, Pepperdine, and was asked by a couple professors to kind of “talk-up” the English rhet/comp major to prospective students at a kind of preview day the university hosts annually. I recall in great detail one parent asking me why I was so happy with my major and I responded because I loved the research. She, of course, kind of looked at me funny and asked what could possibly be left in the field of English left to research. Unfortunately, at the time I was caught off guard and I responded sheepishly “… uh … stuff.” But if I could meet with that parent today, I would shout right at her: “EVERYTHING! … in comp/rhet, at least!” Perhaps—and I suppose this is going to reveal my true colors—there is nothing left to research in literature. We can apply Marxist theory to Joan Didion until our hands fall off, and what will we have accomplished? A whole lot of practice and exercising of Marxist criticism, but probably not much else. And while I suppose that’s all and well … that’s old rhetoric, hearkening back to the days when education prided itself on perform the same mundane act countless times. But there is much more to be discovered in the field of comp/rhet. Just to name a few areas (which personally interest me), what’s up with: hypertext, the Internet, writing with technologies, web 2.0, secondary orality, and visual rhetoric? Not much, though much more it seems every day, is being said … being researched in these areas. Perhaps this is the answer to Yancey’s bewilderment (though I suppose she’s slightly being ironic here) that there is an ever decreasing amount of jobs in the English department for literature scholars while an ever increasing amount of jobs becoming available for comp scholars. But in any case, you make the call: is comp studies an art or a science?

One final, quick question … and totally shifting gears. Hill claims, and Juzwik (et al.) support with research, that there is a vast gap in the place high school seniors are with writing proficiency with where college freshmen need to be. The answer, as commented on by Yancey and also briefly mentioned in all three histories of Brereton, Phelps, and Nystrand, is freshman composition courses. I suspect that this gap has something to do not with the stupidity of the majority of students but rather the educational “mission statements” of secondary education vs. that of the college/university. What does secondary education want to teach their students and what does the university aim at teaching their students? I think the answers are not, as some might expect, the same.