Thursday, March 4, 2010
Making Connexions
In this Tuesday's class, Dr. Souder tasked us with creating connections between the mass of material we are reading in Norton and our presentation research. We are, in other words, being asked to invent. After all, is invention not the basis of the product/process problem that has dominated the last two hundred pages of Norton? Edward P.J. Corbett advances this idea in "The Topoi Revisited" stating that "it has been only since the shift of interest from the finished product to the generating process that many teachers of composition have developed a curiosity about how their students go about writing the papers that they are assigned to write" (44). The renewed focus on the product/process problem engendered an interest in empirical research. If composition is not a "nonrational" activity, then there must be a way to quantify what we can and should teach. This emphasis on research and the reproduction of results can be seen as an attempt to borrow some of the ethos shared by the scientific disciplines. David Foster writes that "experiments will test and correct hypotheses which, in turn, will form more truthful knowledge...finally, composition inquiry has adopted the scientific methodology that will allow it to make defensible truth-claims" (453). Because science is based on fact, composition studies will, in theory, carry more weight if they are conducted in a scientifis manner. Foster's claim that composition departments are attempting to form an identity by borrowing ethos from other disciplines echoes a similar claim made by William Riley Parker in regard to English departments. Parker stats that English departments absorbed speech "in the hope of gaining academic respectability" (14). This borrowing of ethos was done by both English and Composition departments in order to increase respectiblity. In the same article, Parker states that "'English' has never really defined itself as a discipline" (13). This claim is echoed by Foster, who states that composition "cannot claim clear title for a recognized name" (451). Thus, there are multiple connections between the essays that we read. Granted, if we read enough there are bound to be connections, but, I like to think that as writer, teachers, and potential scholars we "don't find meanings, [we] create them" (Flowers 467).
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I have found the number of Norton articles focusing on scientific methodology regarding composition to be surprising. I wouldn't have expected that approach from what is essentially seen, as you address, as an "English" subject. I do see benefit to using that methodology, not least of which is the ethos it lends to the discipline. It gives us a way to quantify processes that are viewed as nonrational. However, having said that, I do believe that composition is a hybrid of rational and nonrational processes, as articles such as "Pre-Writing" have indicated. Using scientific methodology can only take us so far in understanding the writing process and depending on it for all the answers is destined to fail us. There is no one, definitive answer to how we write because it's a relative and subjective process, even with common, quantitative elements. Interesting topic!
ReplyDeleteI have been really intrigued by this notion of data collection to support theories in rhetoric and composition. I am, without a doubt, a more creative, right-brain person, but I am attracted to these scientific methods applied to writing. I love the idea that we can do primary research--creating our own data, rather than merely relying on the scholarly writings of others. It feels so much more authentic. And, like Enos points out, it allows us to get our hands dirty.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that composition scholars are trying to be more credible by being scientific with their research. But as I stated in my own blog this week, I am skeptical of their outcomes. One of the rules that governs the scientific method states that your experiment must be conducted and written down step-by-step in such a way that it can be reproduced independently by anyone to similar outcomes. Since the variables, particularly the writer variable, is always changing, this close adherence to the scientific method is impossible.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, we writers can glean something important from the scientific community: objectivity. As Enos pointed out in an analogy, we need to stop listening to what scholars say about Troy and actually go to Troy to find out for ourselves.
I am also inclined to agree with Flowers that we create rather than find meanings. I think too that the interest in the process of writing, while beneficial, must also be understood as something that lacks the physical constant factors of the sciences. It makes sense to look at the process naturally. If we can pin down traits of "good" writers, we can impart those techniques to the under-performing writers. However we've seen that not all good writers use the same techniques even though they may share certain perspectives in terms of how they approach their writing.
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