Notes for Maureen's class

This morning, reading the "Introduction" to the new Norton guide to composition studies. Thought I would include a few passages that might be of use for my presentation to Maureen's class on comp/rhetoric.

its democratic spirit (xxxv)

the field today is easily the discipline most alert to questions of textual production and reception (xxxvi).

since its early emergence as an underling gatekeeper in nineteenth century universities...the field has overlaid conservative Western attitudes about linguistic credentials on a more inclusive American democratic individualism that values practical personal choices. (xxxvi)

The typical purposes of composition research and scholarship may be unfamiliar to those encountering them for the first time. For various good reasons, the range of inquiry encountered in this field surprises those new to it. Many still imagine writing largely as an occasion for evaluation and thus expect the discipline that studies it to focus on assessment, grading methods, and students' achievement or its absence. But instead they encounter a broad range of repeatedly addressed topics, diverse methods of research, multiple scholarly genres, and an unusual variety of authorial sources. (xxxvii)

.,.this field's object of study is one of the most complex human activities. Composition studies uncovers expressive processes that are easily separated from their human origins to become "text," an object that may or may not be absorbed by readers and a cultural artifact whose opacity invites many inquiries and speculative interpretations. The field thus may blend into any discipline within the humanities, social sciences, and education studies... This often-cited interdisciplinarity is neither recent nor novel among disciplines that investigate processes like writing that aim for an immediate material result. (xxxviii)

Composition research has accumulated an array of scholarly approaches to forming its questions and gathering evidence, and then to fitting these processes to appropriate genres. (xxxviii)

the field of composition studies marked the beginning of its research program with the 1963 publication of Research in Written Composition, by Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer. Taht brief book analyzed 504 empirical studies of school writing instruction and their disappointing results. (xxxlx)

All pointed out that imagination, inventiveness, and thus writing may be improved by following a composing process, but not improved when taught as elements of a finished textual product. (xxxlx)

this section includes other research projects that established many of the topics that have remained important to composition studies: the relation of writing as a medium to a writer's preparation to write, the variety of forces that sponsor each act of writing, the conscious acts undertaken by the writer, the range of attitudes toward required college-level writing courses, and stances toward acts of revision. (xliii)

Perhaps the most unsettling subtext and resulting argument in this part of the book, one made in diverse ways, is that neither a writer nor a text can be evaluated accurately against a universal standard measuring either "good writing" or "good writers" if such evaluation is based on only one instance of composing over one time period, perhaps in one place. (xliv)