Today’s Plan:
- What is rhetoric?
- Last Thursday
- Miller Discussion
- Homework
My initial questions:
- What is positivism? Why is it a problem for technical writing? What does Miller identify as the most problematic dimension of a non-rhetorical approach to scientific communication?
- Miller identifies 4 problems for technical writing pedagogy that stem from the positivist tradition. How do we avoid them?
- How does Miller–writing in 1979–describe the epistemology that is replacing positivism? [Note: scare-quoting “new”]
- What does it mean to teach technical writing from a communalist perspective? Why might some students reject a communalist approach to teaching writing?
One response to the last question that I want to explore a bit.
Teaching technical writing from a communalist perspective means teaching an understanding of how to belong to a community. The main idea from the passage about this is that writing can become something shared and collaborated on. Miller states, “To write, to engage in any communication, is to participate in a community; to write well is to understand the conditions of one’s own participation – the concepts, values, traditions, and style which permit identification with that community and determine the success or failure of communication” (617). The main idea is that teaching this way would allow better understanding of the power of words, by understanding the impact of individual ideas.
Some students may reject this approach because they are more concerned about their individual grades and learning. This is common, because we are taught to be concerned with individual progress, rather than working and collaborating. This is not true of every case, but is true in competitive fields where the work is more individual focused. Writing is often thought of as an individual practice, something that we work on personally and don’t share with others easily. Students may find it hard to make their ideas work with others.
This is shown through my experience at UNC. Most, if not all writing assignments have been individual. Writing is something that is mostly just shared between the professor and the student, except for in more creative writing focused classes. Until this class specifically, there hasn’t been the prospect of working on something to do with writing in a group setting. I think that this still shows the positivist approach because writing is judged on rubrics and a set of rules, where there isn’t a lot of flexibility (unless, once again, the class is more creatively focused).
So, let me conclude (wherever we are) by swinging this back to why we have to care about this as writers–and, perhaps, as “technical writers.” We have to talk about Arendt and Arendt. America’s divisions. Katz.
Homework
