From Product to Process / Rhetorical Invention & Heuristics

Prefatory Notes & General Longwindedness…

This week, we start off with a 2014 New York Times article that asks “Can Writing Be Taught?” — a central question that motivated scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s on rhetorical invention and the process movement in composition studies. If we’re still asking the question, we probably don’t have all the answers, and for that, the question is absolutely worth exploring.

We’ll be reading semi-chronologically this week, with Murray, Perl, and Faigley, and then hopping backwards for Lauer. While the dates on her works (the ones we’ll be reading this week) span 1970 to 2004, issues in rhetorical invention, heuristics, and prewriting make up the bulk of her life’s work in composition studies and are just a small sampling of the significant contributions she’s made to the field in this area.

Donald Murray is an important figure in the Process Movement in composition studies. Among his contributions was “Teach Writing as Process, Not Product” (1972). Phrased as a blunt imperative, the title alone reflects the sea change that saw the scholarly conversation moving away from criticisms of Current Traditionalism (instruction in the modes of discourse, emphasis on form, and modeling) and moving toward contributing to what would be the Process Movement. Murray didn’t usher in the Process Movement, but he made significant contributions^[1], and perhaps, he put a name to work already being done in rhetorical invention.^[2]

Murray divides up the process into the familiar prewriting, writing, and revising “stages.” Of course, the term “stages” is problematic for its suggestion of linearity and separation, and to this, Murray adds, “it is not a rigid lock-step process.” Despite this, his language falls bit short of supporting the idea of recursiveness that characterizes our current understanding of process. In general, process pedagogies conceptualize writing as recursive — a non-linear process of linked and overlapping activities.

The idea of recursiveness is central to Sondra Perl’s work in “Understanding Composition,” wherein she rejects the already (/somewhat) rejected idea of writing as a linear process and adds to it “felt sense.” (You didn’t see that one coming, did you?) And how about that felt sense? If we endorse the idea of felt sense as Perl describes it, what does it mean to our beliefs about the writing process, the teaching of writing, and our position as teachers of writing?

Taxonomy Time! For our purposes, Faigley’s “Competing Theories of Process” (1986) is important for three reasons: 1) it’s one of the major taxonomies or field maps in composition studies^[3], 2) it’s the first to name three distinct schools of thought that make up the process movement, and 3) it’s both a defense and a criticism of process movement as a whole. Those criticisms are central to what became a major critique and response to the process movement — the somewhat predictably named post-process movement.

Jumping backwards and looking ahead, we have Janice Lauer addressing the nuts and bolts of process writing in 1970, long before Connors marked the fall of the modes of discourse (which haven’t really fallen anywhere, unless you count “out of favor,” or “repackaged” as a fall). In the crisis of current traditionalism, Lauer was one of a few germinal scholars who (re)turned to the canons of classical rhetoric. Returning to our rhetorical roots was largely pragmatic as a means to deal with the realities of teaching composition in the trenches. But it was also a move towards disciplinarity, as then “Sister” Janice Lauer asserted in opening lines that are equal parts poetry, prophesy, and sisterly smackdown:

Although indirect, in Lauer, we see that rhetoric and dialectic are together again (not that they were ever really separate)… Screw you, Peter Ramus.

Required Readings:

Questions to Consider

• Murray offers a lot of advice(?) for what we should and shouldn’t do as writing teachers. How might we enact some of his advice within the constraints of the FYC sequence? How would putting his advice into practice meet/not meet the various goals of FYC?
• Do you experience Perl’s “felt sense”? Something like it? What is your experience as a writer? As writers and/or as writing teachers, is there some way to generalize what what “felt sense” is or how to experience it? In other words, is there something useful in the concept of “felt sense” that we could engage in our writing and/or our writing classrooms?
• Similar to above, in hindsight, can you identify your own process/es of retrospective and/or projective structuring? If we can learn to identify such processes, is there a way to adjust them in order to improve our writing?
• In general, do we (composition theorists, teachers, and writers) need to make some distinction between writing and academic writing? (or between other forms of writing?)