--Gary Olson

What is theory?

The opposite of ‘theory' is not ‘practice' but rather ‘thoughtlessness' or even ‘mindlessness.' Theory is not opposed to practice; it is opposed to muddled thought, to confusion. Similarly, the antonym of ‘practice' is not ‘theory' but rather laziness, inertia, lack of accomplishment. The ‘theory/practice' dichotomy is, therefore, a false. . . . Theory is a form of practice and that practice is the operational dimension of theory.

--Charles Schuster

Abraham Kaplan's Law of the Instrument

Put a hammer in the hands of a toddler, and she will quickly conceptualize the whole world as resembling a nail in need of pounding.

January 31

“Pre-Writing: The State of Discovery in the Writing Process”

D. Gordon Rohman CCC (May 1965)

“Writing is usefully described as a process . . . . We divided the process at the point where the writing idea is read for the words and page: everything before that we called ‘Pre-Writing,' everything after ‘Writing' and ‘Re-Writing'”*

“Pre-Writing we defined as the stage of discovery in the writing process . . .”

*Refers to study “Construction and Application of Models for Concept Formation in Writing,” funded by US Office of Education cooperative Research Project Number 2174.

Donald Murray on the Composing Process

Prewriting is everything that takes place before the first draft. Prewriting usually takes about 85% of the writer's time. . . . In prewriting, the writer focuses on [the] subject, spots an audience, chooses a form which may carry his subject to his audience. Prewriting may include research and daydreaming, notemaking and outlining, title-writing and lead-writing.

Writing is the act of producing a first draft. It is the fastest p art of the process . . . And the writing of this first draft—rough, searching, unfinished—may take as little as one percent of the writer's time.

Rewriting is reconsideration of subject, form, and audience. It is researching, rethinking, redesigning, rewriting—and finally, line-by-line editing . . . It may take many times the hours required for a first draft, perhaps the remaining fourteen percent of the time the writer spends on the project.

Kenneth Burke 

Occupational Psychosis : a pronounced character of mind relating to one's occupation or a certain way of thinking that went with a certain way of living

Terministic Screen : the development of a p art icular perspective on life that results in a framework for seeing that directs attention toward some things and diverts it away from others; it's embedded in and signaled by the very terms used

Trained Incapacity: the result of occupational psychosis and terministic screen, trained incapacity is the condition in which our abilities function as blindness—“a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing”

Interrogating Theory as Method* 

What is this theory about? What is the object of study? What phenomenon is being theorized?

What is this theory expected to account for? What is it expected to illuminate or change?

How does this theory make itself systematically accountable for its claims (or its metaphors, its stance, its insights)?

Why and for what does (did) the field need this theory?  

* Adapted from L. W. Phelps syllabus for Adv. Philosophy and Theory of Composition

Definitions of Composing Process 

Murray : [Composing] is a process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. . . The writing process itself can be divided into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting .” (4)

Emig: Writing “is originating and creating a unique verbal construct that is graphically constructed” (8)

D'Angelo: The composing process “is progress toward a goal that is directed by a conscious or unconscious intention or intelligence” (141)

Perl: Composing process consists of “observable composing behaviors”

Sommers: Composing is recursive. “Revision process was defined as a sequence of changes in a composition—changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work” (45)

Flower and Hayes: The composing process “is a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” (274)

February 7

Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What we Need to Know about Writing 

Patricia Bizzell (1982) 

Inner-Directed Theoretical Camp: sees writing as primarilty inner-directed and so is more interested in the structure of language and thinking processes in the earliest state prior to social influence (388)

Outer-Directed Theoretical Camp: sees writing as primarilty outer-directed, and so is more interested in the social processes whereby language learning and thinking capacities are shaped and used in particular communities (388)

Mina Shaughnessy's Classification Scheme

GUARDING THE TOWER (312)

CONVERTING NATIVES (314)

SOUNDING THE DEPTHS (315)

DIVING IN (317)

Three Commonplaces about Creativity

Bartholomae p. 638

  

1. Creativity is Self-Expression

2. Creativity is doing something new or unique

3. Creativity is using old things in new ways

February 14

Definitions to Consider

Ideology

Ideology— (Marxist definition) “the whole system of thought and belief that goes with a social and economic system, the thoughts that structure our thinking so deeply that we take them for granted, as the nature of the real world” (Myers 439) (top down view)

Reproducing Ideology—( Marxist view) the “process of adapting and carrying on the assumptions of our society” (Myers 439)

Ideology —(Brian Street drawing on cultural studies, anthropology and sociolinguistics) “ideology is the site of tension between authority and power on one side and individual resistance and creativity on the other” ( Social Literacies 162) (interactionist view)

Definitions of Reality to Consider

Reality—(empiricist view ) “what is real is given; we gain knowledge of it through our senses, if we are not deceived by non-empirical assumptions and we adapt to it as best we can” (445)

(logical positivist view —the only things that can be known are those that can be known via the senses)

( Marxist view) —“reality is not a monolithic thing out there, but a process in society, an ongoing conflict between various groups, which in turn structures that society. People have no simple unmediated perception of reality; the facts we are likely to take as reality are most likely p art s of another ideological structure” (445)

( expressivist view )—“reality is divided between a cold, clear outside and a warm, messy inside” (450)

(social constructionist view) —reality is a social construct imposed on others

(social constructivist view) —reality is a social process; it takes place in the interaction among individuals

Considering Knowledge

“Knowledge is not uniformly distributed in our society, and . . . is not all of a piece. If we turn a blind eye to social factors we are likely merely to perpetuate the provision of different kinds of knowledge for the rich and the poor” (Myers 452)

What are the properties of knowledge according to Myers?

“ Knowledge . . . is not the result of the confrontation of the individual mind with reality [empiricist view] but of the conversation that organizes the available means we have at any given time to talk about reality” (Trimbur 465)

Compare this definition of knowledge with Myers.

Contact Zone

Contact zone refers “to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many p art s of the world today” (Pratt 34)

 

March 29

Paralogic hermeneutics: “These theories argue that every moment of communicative interaction is singularly unique”

- -Sidney Dobrin p. 140

No [wo]man ever steps into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and [s]he's not the same [wo]man.

-- Heraclitus (6 th BCE)

We may never be able to step into the same river twice but we act as if we can. . . . Although every instant in life is different from all previous instants, people act as if things were constant, as if situations or events could occur repeatedly.

--Young, Becker and Pike (26)

Post-Process Definition

Post-process “in composition studies refers to the shift in scholarly attention from the processes by which the individual writer produces text to the larger forces that affect the writer and of which that writer is a p art ” (Dobrin 132).

Debra Journet's two assumptions:

1) academic disciplines are not pre-existing categories of discrete subject matters, but groups of p art icipants who share common goals and strategies

2) genres are not static typological categories of textual forms but are socially constructed categories of rhetorical action and response (p. 96) 

Boundary Rhetoric: “a new set of genre commitments that transversed the space between multiple disciplines and that allowed writers to create and communicate a new interdisciplinary knowledge”