Rhetorical Canons in a Digital Age

It's no secret that I love technical rhetoric. I can lose hours debating the ins and outs of social networking. I enjoy the finer points of web design. I dabble in coding with html or css, spend way too many hours playing video games, write as part of online communities, and always seek ways to drag these influences into the classroom.

While getting my MA, it also wasn't a secret that a large contingency of my institution's English Department were wary--if not altogether hostile--towards the ever-creeping reach of technology. For them, technology was (and is) a thing to be feared. It is complicated and superficial, difficult to master and even more difficult to teach. It changes constantly, while preserving things well beyond when they should expire.

This animosity (understandable as it is), is why I appreciate articles like James E. Porter's "Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric." Because, for Porter, digital writing and rhetoric isn't just about exploring a new, exciting frontier. It's also about recovering classical elements of rhetoric that, once lost, cost women, people of color, and other marginalized identities greatly (211). As the focus of rhetoric instruction shifted from orality and narration to informational writing, certain forms of understanding and relating to the world around us (such as verbal communication, storytelling, cultural connections, and oral memory) were devalued. And (surprise, surprise), the forms of understanding that were still "respectable" were almost exclusively those accessible to white, heterosexual, wealthy men (Welch, 1994).

This, however, is not a discourse on the evils of marginalization. Rather, it's a celebration of Porter's simple but encouraging acknowledgement that--with the continuing growth of digital rhetorics--these types of "knowing" have ample opportunity to reclaim their place.

Online discourse is written discourse, true. But it also carries a lot of the hallmarks of oral language. It is responsive and fluid. It is often community driven. And it's physical presentation (whether its through bodily representations of the communicator or the style and accessibility of the text's platform) plays an incredibly important role, hearkening back to the long subjugated canon of delivery.

House of Leaves... not your typical text experience.

This isn't to say that delivery doesn't matter in print texts. It does. But the delivery styles are almost always standardized. They follow relatively similar formats. They demand a certain approach and expectations from readers. Very few challenge these norms (though texts like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves do exist). 

But the Internet doesn't fall into such standard categories. Digital writing isn't so much a genre as it is a medium, encapsulating an enormous range of audiences, forums, styles, and purposes. And while technology creates certain barriers of access that still perpetrate existing class lines, it also offers new forms of accessibility to those who had been previously barred. Because of digital writing's aural quality, its' ties to delivery are more readily apparent. And, as Porter explains, "A robust canon of delivery should help us think more productively about how we are writing, and to whom, and lead us to make smarter choices as writers/designers, whether we are producing online information or non-digital information" (211).

Making a Withdrawal - Stepping Away from the Banking Method of Education.

I think I might be in love with Paulo Freire.

He wouldn't be my first academic love (an odd and eclectic category that includes C.S. Lewis, Cicero, and--perhaps most embarrassingly--James Paul Gee). While I would never claim that Freire's style in any way resembles theirs (or that theirs resemble each other's), one thing they do all have in common is their ability to craft beautiful, and elegantly simple prose. They take things I hold dear, and they illuminate them with language that is engaging--sometimes even stunning--and yet still easy to understand. With Lewis, it's Christianity. With Cicero, it's the nature of discourse itself. And with Gee and Freire....it's students.

Freire's exploration of the banking model of education (where students are simply vessels where instructors "deposit" knowledge until they are full) strikes to the core of a lesson I've been slowly learning the more that I teach. The traditional education system is a top-down affair. The teacher is the authority. The students are subjects. As I have told students time and again, the classroom is not a democracy.

But what Freire points out--and what I'm realizing I really believe--is that, however true that is, it's not okay. Or, at the very least, it's a system that needs to be made visible.

So often, instructors of college freshmen lament their "inability" to exercise critical thought. They rail against students caught in the nets of five paragraph essays, stringent page requirements, and the ever cliched transitions of "First....secondly....and in conclusion..." Yet what they don't acknowledge is that, given our current system of education, to expect anything else is ludicrous. As Freire points out:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (73)

In other words, our students spend years learning how to memorize and regurgitate "knowledge" on command. They learn to adapt to a system. And it's especially evident in our "good" students (which, of course, we find en mass in college settings)...because these are the ones who learned how to play the game without making waves. They don't challenge the system, because they've learned that this is something that's frowned upon. They don't question the teacher, because that way leads to danger and stress and bad grades. They have learned to be vessels.

It's a system that I hate, and yet I know I have also done my time as one of of the "well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are only serving to dehumanize" (75). I generally am an open book. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I'm quick to share my opinions....and when I occupy a position of authority (as I do every day in the classroom), those seemingly harmless opinions become law. And this remains just as true when I walk in with naive ideas of instilling a social justice-esque curriculum, if my means of doing so follows the banking method. Well-intentioned or not, if I simply inform my students of "how the world is," I am part of the problem. "[true humanists] cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society" (78).

I share my opinions with my class. I feel that, risky as it is, it's more dishonest to pretend to be utterly objective. But I try to remember that "liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals [sic] of information" (79). My job is not to inform my students how they should view the world. My job is to get them to start thinking about it...to start questioning the systems that have been invisible to them and which they've taken for granted.

I might not like the conclusions they come to. But that's the point. Their agreement with me means nothing if I never give them a chance to not.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Theory, Practice, and the Written Word: Or Working Around My Grudge With Academese

It's no secret that I have a grudge against poorly written academic texts ("poorly written" here meaning writing that makes my eyes glaze over and my brain cringe from jargon). I've written about it before, ranted publicly many a time, and I undoubtedly will again.

But however much I rail against an overabundance (in my opinion) of academese, I appreciate those moments when I get called out on exactly what I'm railing against.

It's true that a great deal of academic writing is overwrought. I'm guilty of this, myself (my MA thesis was an embarrassing collection of passive sentences and convoluted paragraphs filled with agonizing prose). It's an easy pitfall in a world where passive structures imply objectivity. Drowning in deadlines, publication requirements, and way too much caffeine, we have limits to what we can manage. If a piece is grammatically correct, understandable (if only barely), and a publisher is actually willing to take it....does it really matter if it's a bit heavy handed?

I'd say yes. My goal for my writing and my scholarship is communication. Clarity. Scholarship that is drowning in academese places a barrier between theory and reader, lessening the audience who can actually be impacted. If I want my research to make waves, I need it to be the kind of thing that people come back to willingly. Not the kind that graduate students reluctantly trudge through, thoughts of bonfires dancing in the back of their thoughts, before shoving it into a pile of other quickly-forgotten texts. I long to emulate scholars like James Paul Gee, Nancy Sommers, or Wendy Bishop; I want my research to be practical, applicable, and ultimately readable.

But my desire for clarity and engagement comes at a cost...one that Gary Olson and Kory Lawson Ching have expressed so, so well. In his essay, "Struggling Over Theory, Struggling Over Identity," Olson comments on the role of theory in composition. "I did not argue that everyone should engage in [theoretical] scholarship, or that we should abandon other types of scholarship (such as explorations of effective pedagogy), or that theoretical scholarship should be thought of as superior to alternative modes of investigation--only that as a field we need to widen, not narrow, our intellectual focus" (584). Ching, too, points out the great weakness hidden under all my railing--"to be constantly shooting for [practical] payoff is to privilege, in the parlance of composition, the product over the process" (456).

I know that my own practical knowledge of teaching and praxis has improved drastically since my return to grad school. I was a good teacher before, yes, but studying theory over the past three years (even the theory that left me writhing in mental anguish) has challenged me to question long-held beliefs, to find new ways to interact with my cohort and my students, and to grow...as an instructor and a student. Ching and Olson, in beautifully clear terms, remind me that abstract thought can often only be expressed in abstractions... and it has to start there (and be allowed to stay there) before any move toward practice can feasibly occur. It has to be valued in its gestation.

And, speaking in terms of pragmatics, there's the very real truth that the Academy (with all the ominous, anonymous authority the capital A ascribes) values theory and intellectual complexity. Ching references Sidney Dobrin when he says that without theory "composition scholarship will stagnate, and composition as a field will be defined within the narrow confines of a service orientation (emphasis mine)" (458). Teaching may be what brought me to this field, but the pedagogical imperative (if all-encompassing) becomes a constraint that can hinder our effectiveness as a field or even--equally--as teachers. "We risk invisibility and illegitimacy, and those attributes would have dire consequences for the field as a whole" (458).

My bias will probably always be towards practicality. I like personalized, witty, or practical scholarship. I like things I can hold in my hands and turn into something real. But what I want (however valuable) can't be the be all and end all of the discipline.

Anyone who has taught figures out very quickly that sharing ideas is the best way to plan. We pass lesson plans back and forth. We talk about strategies and approaches and we develop them into new, personalized things. It's a lesson that I am trying to get better about applying to my scholarly life as well. It's not enough to stick to the knowledge that I'm most comfortable with. I need theorists in my life. I need other view points. They make me a better teacher, a better scholar, and a better person... and that is valuable enough.

Processing Post-Process

It's not hard to understand why the Process Method became the dominant approach to teaching writing. A focus on "correctness" led to composition becoming a subject of remediation, rather than pride. Process changed that. It valued the stops and starts of writing in all its stages. It embraced imperfections and sloppy transference and the idea that imperfect didn't mean bad. Freshman Composition was still seen as a place of preparation, but Process instruction focused more on preparing students to think than on how to correct. As Peter Elbow says in Everyone Can Write, "I cannot teach students the particular conventions they will need for particular disciplines, but I can teach students the principle of discourse variation. ... I can't teach them the forms they'll need, but I can sensitize them to the notion of differences in form so [they]... will pick them up faster when they encounter them" (253).

The whole point of Process instruction was that focusing on the end product was detrimental to students. Even if they could write the perfect Lit Review or Research Paper, that knowledge left them utterly unprepared for the types of writing they would encounter in other disciplines (their disciplines) if they didn't understand the process that got them there. And focusing on process, rather than product, allowed teachers to reclaim a position of pride. "The teacher gets a new role by this shift of criteria from truth and good style to effect" (Elbow, A Method for Teaching Writing). They become a facilitator who teaches students how to learn, rather than an editor or drillmaster "fixing" bad writing.

The hope of the Process method was that the responsibility for learning and "good" writing would be on students' shoulders. They would become self-motivated. After all, they were focusing on their thoughts. Their ideas. Their processes. Their audiences. Surely they'd care about the outcome, right?

The problem is that the answer is a resounding......sometimes. Maybe.

Freshman composition is still a required course, rather than an elective. The teacher is still in a position of authority, and our students still look to us for the "right" answer. Process means understanding that there are many roads that lead to the same destination...but for students who are unfamiliar with a task, it's easy to believe that the process they learn in the classroom (often the teacher's preferred writing process) is the only process out there.

Enter post-process....which, at first, can feel as obscure and inaccessible as so many of the posts (post-modernism, post-materialism, post-structuralism, etc...). Advocates seem to disagree wildly on just how and why the process method is flawed: from Thomas Kent who would like to pitch it all out--bathwater and the baby, too-- to Bruce McComiskey who sees post-process as a continuation of what process started.

My largest problem with Post-Process theorists (at least as far as I understand them) isn't that they see a problem. They're concerned about students writing the perpetual "My Summer Vacation" essay, or the focus on a single process cutting out different learning styles, or the fact that self-centered writing ignores the fact that culture, society, and context drastically change what and how we write. And, I agree, these are all issues. But, to me, the problem isn't that process ignores these things. Not necessarily.

The problem is that process, taught badly, ignores these things.

Starting with personal knowledge means nothing until you can explain why anyone else should listen. You can't understand your own rhetorical exigence until you understand how that exigence is formed by the culture around you...such as why so many of our students want to write about the general, hot-button topics that they've heard their parents argue. It's not that they can't think for themselves. And it's not that they, themselves, are always affected by the issue. But they are affected by their parents caring. They are affected by their social circles talking about these things. And they react to those discussions, wanting to join in with something familiar and, obviously, important to the people around them.

My issue with Post-Process isn't that it's wrong. It's that I feel like it's the same thing...just done better. Which is to say, I don't have an issue with it at all. I just don't see why we're fighting to begin with.

All the things she said...and he said....and me.

If recent proposals for legislation over copyright tell us nothing else, they tell us (clearly) that authorship has become increasingly complex in our digital age. Or, perhaps, has simply made that complexity very, very visible.

It's a conflict that instructors and students know well. Our school charters and handbooks come equipped with plagiarism policies and our course syllabai detail the penalties of violating them. Instructors stress originality, individual voice, and creativity....while asking students to include an increasing number of outside sources in their work. These are important lessons--knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum. We prove that we know what we know by engaging in conversations with others in those fields. Verbally or visually, that means acknowledging the other communicators that are out there and then having them respond to us and to each other.

But what happens when that knowledge is just a hyperlink away? Or when the sheer proliferation of available information makes it difficult to discern between "expert" sources and "amateurs?"

Accusations of plagiarism in the composition classroom are loaded. Instructors often feel violated when they receive plagiarized works, as if these texts somehow reflect a students' character or opinion of the instructor. Students plagiarize because they are lazy, disrespectful, inattentive, or (to be horribly politically incorrect) "dumb." In fact, a lot of the things instructors say about plagiarism seem to echo the attitudes Joseph Williams describes towards grammatical errors in his essay "The Phenomenology of Error." Responding to critical language regarding poor grammar, Williams says:

The last thing I want to seem is sanctimonious. But...what happens in Cambodia and Afghanistan could more reasonably be called horrible atrocities. The likes of Idi Amin qualify as legitimate oafs. Idiots we have more than enough of in our state institutions. And while simply [sic] illiteracy is the condition of billions, it does not characterize those who use disinterested in its original sense (152).

In many ways, I'd say instructor responses to plagiarism follow a very similar line. Intellectual theft is a serious crime...but how many of our students are truly operating under the intent of claiming someone else's work as their own? In amateur works, uncertainties and incomplete understanding about citation and "proper" research can lead to shortcuts or mistakes that, to all intents and purposes, look like plagiarism.

Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss take a different approach towards information appropriation. For them, research becomes a matter of remixing old information into something new. In other words, "[r]emixing—or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product—is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Remix is perhaps the premier contemporary composing practice." In order for them to approach writing as a remix, however, Ridolfo and Devoss stress that instructors need to get rid of the idea that remix is simply cutting and pasting, or that this process is restricted only to music. Remixing is any type of composition where something new is created from bits and pieces of other works that have either been recontextualized and/or modified by the new "author." 

Remixing and composition can be a tricky subject. Blatant intellectual theft is a problem and those distinctions need to be explored. But viewing research and research papers as remixes of other information allows us to participate in the idea of diaspora that Paul Butler explores in his article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies." By viewing knowledge as shared and transformable, it opens the possibility for solid research in multiple genres, styles, and mediums. 

If a Writer Blogs in the Middle of the Internet, Will Anybody Read?

Why write?

It's a question I hear all the time. From students. From relatives. From myself. Why am I doing this?

The fact that I'm even putting these thoughts on "paper" (does the turn of phrase still count in the digital realm) supposes--perhaps vainly--that someone will read it. That they will care. And it's there that my students often have the most difficulty. I can't even blame them. Writing papers in sterilized settings for an audience of one...what impact can they have? I can have them construct an audience. I can have them twist their prose to match the expectations of this invisible force. But they always know. It's a facade as heavy and stifling as thick makeup, clogging the pores and smoothing the edges into something unnatural. Fake.

Of course, Walter Ong (1) might say that there's no real difference between my class's "pretend" audience and a "real" audience--at least so far as it pertains to written discourse. Writing this, I'm creating my readers in my head; I make assumptions about their interests, their purpose for coming here, and what tone will inevitably interest them or drive them away. And Ong's approach is certainly practical. Unless I'm writing for one person and one person alone, it's unlikely that my audience will fit into a nice, neat box (and even then, there are issues of identity and knowing and masks...but that is an altogether different topic). Yet, as easy as it is to say "it's all in our heads!" that doesn't feel right, either.

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford (2) have an approach that is more my style. They talk about an interaction of reality and imagination--the intersection of the "real" audience and the audience I've created in my head. It's tied up in social perceptions and assumptions and communication. It's messy and complex and involves a whole lot of language, and that appeals to me. Ideas aren't neat. Life isn't black and white. Why should writing be?

So I write anyway, and I ask my students to write. I ask them to write for their "real" audience (me. Always me) while holding that imaginary audience in their heads. I ask them to think about the messy intersections of what matters and who it matters to and what it takes to communicate with those people. We talk about (or, I hope we talk about) how we are always responding to the world around us (3). We don't write in a vacuum. We don't even think in a vacuum. And, in those cases where our voice can't seem to find its place in the society we're presented with, we try to make ourselves heard. We navigate a confusing mess of societal pressures and expectations to claim something that (we hope) is utterly and uniquely "us" (4).

Why write?

Because I have to. Because I'm finding my voice, and the only way I can do that is by talking and listening to other people talk. Because I love language.Because I care. I care even when others aren't listening. I care because others aren't listening. And because I know of no better way to impact the world around me.

And maybe, just maybe, someone will hear.

1. Ong - The Writer's Audience is Always Fiction
2. Ede and Lunsford - Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy
3. Lefevre - Invention as a Social Act
4. Royster - When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own, Lanham - Where's the Action?

Why Discourse?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "discourse" as the following:

1. a. Onward course, process or succession of time, events, actions, etc.
2. a. The act of understanding, by which it passes from premises to consequences; reasoning, thought, ratiocination; the faculty of reasoning, reason, rationality.
    b. Phr. discourse of reason: process or faculty of reasoning.

So what exactly do we (and here I get into a tangled web of who "we" really is...though for the purposes of this blog, I'll say rhetoricians or writing instructors), mean by "discourse" and should we bother teaching it at all?

For James P. Gee, Discourse (capital D inclusive) is more than just the language that is used in a given circumstance; it is also the thoughts, world views, and practices that engender that language. For example, when teachers lament that their students are incapable of writing academically or that they fall prey to the ever infamous "academese," they often are referring to the specific language that gets used in academic genres. Gee's point, however, is that writing doesn't occur in a vacuum. Our students are not unable to write "academically" because of some in-set failing. Our students are unable to write "academically" because they have not been allowed into the very community that uses that form of communication. Language, separated from its true context, becomes forced, false, and little more than an exercise in futility.

This isn't to say that practice doesn't serve a purpose. Of course it does. It's by practicing that we improve in any skill. But viewing language as a discourse is to rhetoric what the whole language approach is to grammar. When we try to separate genres, skill sets, or practices from an appropriate discourse community, we are effectively teaching writing as "prescriptive grammar" (which, for many 'in the know' compositionists has come to be seen as a cardinal sin, as condemnable as murder, thievery, and talking in the theater*). Those assignments have a purpose. They have value. But if our students are incapable of discerning that purpose, it becomes much harder for them to achieve it or to apply it in future situations.

So why discourse? Why do we fight to categorize language and itemize it and contextualize it, knowing that it is amorphous and intrinsically tied to our cultures, our time, and our self-perception?

Writing is communication. With ourselves. With others. It's discovery and thought and our way of seeking to understand and be understood. We study discourse in order to hear and be heard. Inevitably, we will participate in the conversation. We can't not. But we become more effective as we seek to understand the larger picture.

*Yes, it's a bad attempt at a Firefly reference. Please don't sue me.

Rhetoric, Composition, and the "Teaching" Problem

In her 2008 article, Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future, Karen Kopelson talks about the "pedagogical imperitive" of Rhet/Comp programs. In other words, the idea that everything we do is in service of teaching. It's an eye-opening article....or, at least it was for me.

Teaching hasn't always been my focus. When asked how I decided I wanted to teach, I insist that (once upon a time), I wanted to be an actress or a singer or an author or a lawyer. Except that insistence ended in high school, when I finally realized that teaching was the one time that I could step outside myself and my job and focus on doing something that truly felt important, empowering, and engaging. So, aside from childhood dreams that could easily have (and probably did at least once) included marrying into royalty or traveling to the moon, teaching has truly been a constant presence in my life. It's no surprise, then, that my path back to graduate school ended with my joining a discipline that is heavily "teaching focused."

Yet however easily I fell into the pedagogical imperative (embraced it, even), the centrality of teaching to rhet/comp programs is something that needs to be questioned. It's not that I think that pedagogy isn't of vital importance. Teaching is my life and my joy (however trite that sounds) and I wouldn't trade it for the world. But one of the reasons I embraced college teaching as opposed to staying at the middle school level is due to the academic rigor I could find here. Teaching is pragmatics. As St. Augustine mentions in his On Christian Doctrine, we use different "levels" or styles of speaking depending on our purpose. Teaching is given the simplest level...not because of its lack of importance, but because its success hinges on the audience understanding what is being said. Technical jargon or "proper" niceties give way to communication. But pragmatics cease to be pragmatic if they aren't aiming towards a larger goal. Which, of course, begs the question that Rhetoric & Composition is still trying to answer: What is our larger goal?

Janice Lauer (the founder of Purdue's Rhet/Comp department), points out that one of rhetoric and composition's defining features is its ability to be "multidisciplinary, not only in [rhet/comp's] theoretical bases but also in [its] modes of inquiry. Of course, its that very diversity that leaves people questioning whether it should count as a discipline at all. Are we solely a "teaching" discipline? Are we defined by our lore (North, 1987), or our focus on process and post-process (Carlton, 1995), or our "feminized" style of discourse (Lauer, 1995)? Or can we, as Kopelson asks, embrace all of it?

Theory has never been my favorite focus. Like the teachers Louise Phelps comments on in Practical Wisdom, I too can be "impatient with [theory's] abstractions and irrelevance" (863). But, however my own personal opinion falls, I think we are doing ourselves a vast disservice if we limit the field only to people who share that view.

We are the field of rhetoric. We live in words and conversations and debates...sometimes over the most trivial of matters, it's true, but the point is that everything matters. Nothing exists in a vacuum. While philosophy might seek the "ultimate truth" and the sciences attempt to catalogue and demystify the laws of nature, we stumble into the amorphous fog in all its shades of grey (just so long as there aren't 50 of them). We dissect. We discuss. We debate. We disagree.

And that's okay.

I can insist on theory that has practical application. My passion is teaching, my mindset is pragmatic, and I have greater interest in the here and now than in the larger mysteries of the universe. But it is the discussions with others who do trouble themselves about ethics and history and culture and society and abstraction that allows me to keep pushing myself and my students to new levels. It is those conversations that help me to find my footing and establish myself within the discourse. And while one particular vein of theory might have no relevance to me or my research or my classroom, it is supremely selfish and egocentric to then jump to the conclusion that it is of no relevance to anyone. Or, even, to assume it needs relevance.

Perhaps what defines us as a group is our unending examination of the complexities of language and discourse. How that takes form will be different for each of us (research would be awfully useless if it didn't), but I don't think our disagreements make those conversations any less valuable.