Today’s Plan:
- How goes it?
- Readings: (Post)Process, (Post)Pedagogy, (Post)Modernism
- Danielle’s Presentation on Logos, Ethos, Pathos, and campaign advertisements
- Syllabus Review
- Wednesday: Computer Lab / Having them comment on each other’s work
- Friday: Workshopping
- Monday: Danielle’s presentation / activity on ethos, pathos, logos
- My (Quick-ish) presentation on the distinction between reason and evidence
- Homework: Paper Day #1
Readings / Theory
Below is the email from yesterday, with a few changes and expansions. But before we get to that, I wanted to pull back a bit and have a more general introduction about the transition into graduate school and the preponderance of theory you are likely encountering/ will encounter.
I also wanted to highlight a few key points in the Lynch reading:
- how to balance contingency and possibility, 61
- method and habit without recipes, 65
- transmission and/as participation, 67
- connecting course content to everyday experience, 69
- content and a writing class: how vs what, 70
- challenge: the relation between theory and practice, 75
- experience as equipment for living, 79
- what is method, 80
- role of teachers, 83
- learning as doing, 85
- the self and others, 86
- process as testing ourselves, 87
- work ahead of us, 92
The Murray piece is a short sample of “process” pedagogy, a kind of “origin” piece. In the decades after its publication, writing studies became more and more invested in the notion of writing as a process. In its zeal, it strove to transform the idea of writing as A process into THE writing process (brainstorming, drafting, sharing, revising, editing, publishing or some sort of pattern). By the mid 1980’s some form of this process approach appeared at virtually every level of writing instruction.
At the same time–in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s–Rhetoric and Composition became increasingly invested in poststructural and postmodern thought. This investment was particularly strong because 1) both philosophical movements were rooted in the dynamic, unpredictable properties of written language and 2) both movements echoed ancient rhetoricians such as Gorgias, Protagoras, Isocrates, and Cicero–a group we collectively refer to as “the sophists.” Whereas ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle were invested in Truth, and the abstract, Idealist philosophical systems that could lead us to Certainty, the sophists were interested in language and power (paging Derrida and Foucault).
So, long story short, the early 1990’s started a movement against the idea of THE writing process–the idea that anything as choric, kairotic, unpredictable, inventive (choose your adjective) as writing could be reduced to a repeatable system, a recipe, a step-by-step list of instructions. This is what Thomas Kent, Gary Olson, Victor Vitanza, Cynthia Haynes and others identified as the “postprocess” movement. The idea was to develop approaches to writing that opened students to possibility without stifling those possibilities (those familiar with Derrida’s approach to signification in Signature, Event, Context might sniff a connection, and Olson et al were especially interested in Derrida: the idea that meaning between a signifier and signified can only take place IF we maintain the possibility that it might not take place–language “works” precisely because it in fact doesn’t, etc. I have no idea what familiarity you have with poststructuralism, and am more than happy to answer questions on Tuesday). While Olson wrote an essay elaborating these principles, Vitanza wrote one that performed them:
Yes, “writing” is about sea CHANGE. And that, my d.ear.est, is why we are afraid of the thing called W~R~I~T~I~N~G~, and why we insist on “teaching” writing and IN institutions! I understand that YOU are afraid of the DRUNKEN BOAT.
W-R-I-T-I-N-G, then, is the signified that cannot be reduced to a signifier, the thing that sublimely expands beyond our comprehension. Because we fear the sublime, we fear the uncertain, we (Platonically) reduce this signified, in its multiple, infinite possibilities, to mere “writing.” If we can reduce it further to “academic writing,” all the better, all the safer. The more we can pin the infinity of W-R-I-T-I-N-G down to something we can “know,” control, transmit, the better (re: Derrida’s investment in how articulation operates by reducing the infinite possibility of the signifier).
After the postprocess movement, other scholars started what is called the “postpedagogical” movement–they are related, but have different investments. While “postprocess” refers specifically to writing, “postpedagogical” refers to the institutionalized teacher-student relationship. These theorists, including Vitanza, Thomas Rickert, Byron Hawk, Sarah Arroyo, Gregory Ulmer, Diane Davis, and others work from poststructuralist, postmodern, pyschoanalytic (Lacan, Kristeva) theory to try and deconstruct our relationship to teaching. That is, “pedagogy” is often thought as HOW teachers are able to teach students. It operates on (Foucault would argue) established lines of power–that the teacher is a “master” who must educate his/her students. Even in situations in which teachers might push against these roles, students DESIRE to be taught, to be MASTERED (and this is a core principle of postmodern analysis–both in terms of Foucault and Lacan/Zizek). Postpedagogues resist the student’s desire for mastery by designing classroom in which students must take ownership of their own education (we resist what Freud/Lacan/Zizek would identify as “transference”).
Like poststructuralists, postpedagogues are often notoriously opposed to the idea of education as a system, since they believe real learning emerges kairotically, often unpredictably, through encounter. I think Lynch hyperbolizes this opposition however, since many postpedagogues (myself included) publish extensively on how we try to create these opportunities. While I do think Lynch treats postpedagogy a bit uncharitably, his own (post)pedagogical contribution–the ideas of reflection and experience–are, I think, quite brilliant.
If this stuff interests you, I would direct you toward two publications. In “Postpedagogy and Webwriting,” Mark Leahy and I lay out a postpedagogical, theoretical foundation for the course you are teaching (I want to look at one paragraph in this one). In “Towards a Technical Communication Made Whole,” Megan McIntyre and I respond directly to Lynch’s book.
Syllabus Review: Wednesday Sept 21st
Class: Writing in the computer lab. Revising some sentences from #1 Pieces. Two workshop volunteers for Friday.
Home: I will email out links to or copies of the workshop writing for Friday. Before then, you should comment in the discussion forums for week 6 workshopping.
Are you using the discussion forums for workshopping? Or are you grading the workshop participation in class?
I would like to add one activity for the computer lab day–I’m going to dedicate the first 20 minutes of class to having them read and comment on two student-composed medium essays. I have put together a Google Doc to help facilitate this. I will give them 10 minutes to read the essay and follow my modified “Praise, Question, Polish” heuristics from the Neubert and McNelis article we read:
- Praise: What is good about the writing? What should not be changed? Why is it good? As you read, highlight one sentence and craft a comment.
- Question: As a reader, what do you not understand? What could the author clarify? Again, highlight a specific sentence or two for this comment.
- Polish: As a final comment, what else would you have liked the writer to address? Were they to do another draft of this, what do you think they could add, revisit, or do next? OR Give the writer a gut reaction–I agree because… I disagree because… As you do so, try to add a new perspective to the topic.
Syllabus Review: Friday Sept 23rd
Class: “Links, Transitions, Evidence” Class Notes
Workshop.
Home: Due Sunday at 11:59pm, Piece #2 Draft. Remember to use a bridge from They Say chapter 5.
So that semester I wrote a short paragraph on transitions and evidence in response to a student paragraph that contained a big logical jump. Here’s what I wrote:
But I also want to talk about arrangement and logical development. I haven’t said too much about thesis statements in the class because I think they carry a lot of baggage and generally confuse people. What I want to talk about instead is making claims. At the core, good writing is structured to make a claim and then provide evidence and reasons to support that claim (evidence and reasons are the two major categories of logos). My guess is that we all have a good sense of “evidence.” Evidence is tangible, measurable, quantitative, material. One can point to it. A videotape of a robbery, for instance. Evidence isn’t necessarily invented, it is found or measured. Reasons are different. Wikipedia offers a nice, concise definition for “reason”: “A reason is a consideration which justifies or explains.” Reasons are invented (or, using Aristotle’s language, “artistic”). A strong argumentative paragraph will blend a mix of evidence and reasons in support of a claim.
This semester I was a bit more inspired because I see students who are struggling to distinguish reasons from evidence. So I’m going to spend 15 minutes or so on this next Thursday, after I’ve done Danielle’s Logos, Ethos, Pathos presentation. The lecture appears below.
Monday Sept 25th
Monday September 26
Class: “Kairos” Class Notes
Home: Read They Say, I Say Chapter 6. Complete exercise #2 on page 91. Read and begin drafting Piece #3.
Instead of doing the Kairos on Monday, we should be doing Danielle’s exercise on logos, ethos, and pathos. Christina is presenting on kairos on Tuesday the 26th, and that should give you something to do in the computer lab on Wednesday.
Logos: Reasons and Evidence
Last class we talked about the three primary rhetorical appeals, logos, ethos, and pathos. Today I want to focus attention on one of those appeals, logos, to try and provide you with language and strategies to compose better arguments.
Aristotle’s On Rhetoric is one of the earliest surviving treatises on argument. Given its prevalence in education for over two millenia, it is easily the most influential. Aristotle approaches argument (whether personal, between two friends, or public, as in a debate) as adversarial–a contest between two sides. His format for these arguments is pretty straightforward–first, a speaker should forward a claimproof to support that claim.
Writing a few centuries after Aristotle, but working within his framework, the Roman Cicero elaborated on this argumentative format. Cicero’s structure of an argument was meant for the legal and political contests in the Roman forum. It goes:
- Exordium: The introduction. Grabs attention. Establishes or shifts the audience’s mood (pathos); in some cases establishes the speaker’s character and/or credibility (ethos)
- Narratio: A recap of the facts/events leading up to the argument. This is the stuff that no one would dispute
- Propositio: Your proposition or thesis. What you will attempt to prove. What you believe needs to happen.
- Argumentatio
- Confirmatio: Here is where you present the reason and evidence supporting your proposition
- Confutatio: Here is where you either a) anticipate your opponents’ arguments and offer rebuttal, or, if opportunity provides, directly rebut their arguments
- Peroratio: Review of your proposal, gloss of major evidence, discussion of implications
Now, no one actually writes following these steps in exact order. But most well crafted arguments do contain these elements.
Again, my focus today is on one element of this format–the presentation of reason and evidence. Specifically, I want to explicate the relationship between reasons and evidence (and, obviously, show how they are two different things).
Aristotle provides us a way into making the distinction between reasons and evidence when he defines two distinct types of “proof”: artistic proof and inartistic proof. I say “a way into” because, as I hope to show, Aristotle’s categories require complication. But before I get to that, let’s take a look at what Aristotle has to say on the nature of proof:
Of the piseis, some are atechnic (“non-artistic”), some entechnic “embodied in art, artistic”). I call atechnic those that are not provided by “us” [i.e., the potential speaker] but are preexisting: for example, witnesses, testimony from torture, contracts, and such like; and entechnic whatever can be prepared by method and by “us”; thus one must use the former and invent the latter. Of the pisteis provided through speech there are three species: some are in the character [ethos of the speaker], and some in disposing the listener in some way [pathos, and some in the speech [logos] itself, by showing or seeming to show something.
This passage has caused quite a bit of confusion over the years–what does Aristotle mean that logos is to “show or seem to show something”? And how is this different from “using” something (which would be inartistic)? Let me hazard an answer.
By inartistic, Aristotle means to single out anything that has to be accepted “as is.” This doesn’t mean we can question it, only that we cannot deny its existence and hold no questions about what it says (what it *means* is an entirely different matter). For instance, the testimony of a witness. Of course even in Aristotle’s day someone would question whether a witness actually saw what they think they saw or whether she might be lying (and Aristotle is quite clear that we should never accept the testimony of a tortured slave–he is a bit more opaque on whether we should torture slaves….). No one, however, would question that the witness offers an account of what happened. Aristotle would undoubtedly put “science” into this category. A scientist does an experiment. It produces a “fact.” Now–as we are all aware–others can come along and question the integrity of the fact, whether the methods that produced the fact were flawed, the motives of the scientist (ethos), etc. But the “fact” remains (har, har). This is why I believe we have to complicate Aristotle’s approach to evidence–because negotiating in a post-factual world requires we build an artistic case for all our means of persuasion, for all the *evidence* we point to. We can’t ever truck out a number and hope to win an argument–we still have to make a case.
But if inartistic proof refers to means of persuasion that already exist, that I can call to speak or grab a quote from, then what are inartistic proofs? I want to focus specifically on logos, the process of showing something to the audience. The best way to think about these is that they are the *reasons* for why we should accept evidence. Reasons offer causes. Evidence offers facts, observations, examples, that support those causes. Reasons are abstract, invented, imagined. You can’t see a reason. Evidence is tangible, measurable, visible. I can show them to you. Ah! I risk confusion here, because Aristotle said that artistic proofs, reasons, logos is “showing or seeming to show something.” But I think this is his point: an artistic proof is when we take an abstract invisible explanation for something and help our audience “see” it.
There’s another part of argument that I won’t overwhelm you with today, and that’s the “warrant.” The “warrant” is what makes explicit the connection between your reasons and your evidence. An easy way to identify a warrant sometimes is if you want to write something like “of course we all know” in front it it. Warrants are something like postulates in math–they are something we expect the audience to accept without question so that an argument can move forward (and often arguments become the most heated when one person challenges someone else’s warrant).
Let me offer a quick example. I want to argue that fantasy baseball players should invest in Jose Berrios next season [Claim]. While Berrios still struggles with his command, he has drastically improved his walk rate and home run rate by fine tuning his delivery. [Reason] As Jeff Sullivan of fangraphs shows, Berrios has made a few mechanical changes to his delivery, reducing the amount of hitches in his throwing motion and improving his balance [Evidence]. Looking at the side by side images of Berrios’ fastball delivery, we can see that he is keeping his head stiller this season and has reduced the amount of “glove flip” prior to his release. This is producing better balance, and better balance produces more consistent results [Warrant]. Last season, Berrios posted a walk rate of 5.4/9, a home run rate of 1.85/9, and a strikeout rate of 7.56/9. This year he has improved in all three categories, more important than his slight increase in strikeout rate (up to 8.47/9) is the fact that he has nearly cut both his walk and home run rate in half (2.78/9 and .99/9 respectively) [Evidence]. By better controlling where he is placing the ball, Berrios is not only keeping runners off base, he is also avoiding hard contact [Drawing conclusion from Evidence].
Here’s what I hope you got out of this quick presentation: when you are crafting arguments, you have to not only find evidence (what “they say”), but you also have to clarify, as part of what you say, why that evidence matters. You have to “invent” as we call it the reason why the audience should accept that evidence, the logical principle that supports your case.
Homework: Paper Days
Next week is our first round of papers. Here is the description from the syllabus:
On paper days, you will condense our readings into a one page, single-spaced legal size paper (yes, I know how inconvenient this is. I wrote around 12 of these papers while in grad school). Beyond providing summary, these papers will focus on putting course readings into conversation, tracing out relationships between the various thinkers and commentaries studied in class, and connecting the readings to your experiences as a new instructor. Students will provide a copy of their paper to each of their classmates. These papers are expected to be at least 1200 words each. Font size must be nine or higher.
We will distribute copies of the papers next week; each writer will read their paper out loud to the class. We will also have time for brief discussion of each paper. However, I believe the value of paper days involve the exposure to other lines of thought (for the audience). The value for writers centers on the oddity of the form: that is, because no one knows what a “paper day” paper really is, it opens possibilities for each writer to invent what they might be. While the point of paper day is freedom to invent, I do want to fix a few constraints into place:
- The paper needs to put the readings we have done this semester in conversation
- You need to work with at least one reading from each group below
- What does it mean to be a writer? To be a teacher of writing? Elbow, “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic”; Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing”; Murray, “The Teaching Craft: Telling Listening, Revealing”; Edwards and Paz “Only Geniuses Can Be Writers”; Parrott, “Some People are Just Born Good Writers”
- Smart Stuff (bigger questions about the nature of rhetoric and the horizons of writing) Corder, “Argument as Emergence”; Ong, “Writing is a Technology”
- Providing Feedback Williams, “Phenomenology of Error”; Moxley, “Responding to Student Writing”; Daiker, “Learning to Praise”; Leahy, “Rubrics Save Time and Make Grading Criteria Better”
- Workshopping Baker, “Peer Review as a Strategy”; Neubert and McNelis “Peer Response”
- How we approach the idea of pedagogy Murray, “Teach Writing as a Process, Not a Product”; Fishman, Lunsford et al.”Performing Writing, Performing Literacy”; Lynch, “The Cultivation of Naivete”
- The paper should focus your path through the readings to explicate one dimension of your teaching this semester (or maybe you use one set of readings to examine one dimension, and then transition to another path to explicate another dimension. It is your canvas. Paint a happy tree.)
