Author: J Laurence Cohen

Discussion Questions:

1. How might Russell’s definition of genre as a “typified tool-mediated response to conditions recognized by participants as recurring” be an improvement on notions of genre as types sharing certain formal features?

2. What is gained and lost by treating writing  in general, as well as specific genres, as tools?

3. How does the concept of an activity system differ from that of a discourse community?

4. To what extent does Russell succeed in revealing “genre at work at the individual, dyadic, and collective levels”?

5. What is the significance of “deep contradictions” in an activity system?

6. How might we benefit from treating the classroom as a Zone of Proximal Development?

Discussion Questions:

Pitch:

This film will dramatize the concept of a “discourse community.” Each shot will consist of an image or series of images with voice-over narration. The film will first define discourse communities and then provide specific examples. Discourse communities will be explained as culturally specific sets of language conventions. The film will further describe conventions as rules, practices, or methods relevant to a specific field or activity. One example of differences in discourse communities might be the contrast between lawyers and electricians; another might be the contrast between the Christian concept of heaven and the Buddhist concept of nirvana. The film will also convey the idea that any given person participates in many different discourse communities using a series of Venn Diagrams.

Shot list:

Bizzell’s central claim is that neither inner-directed nor outer-directed theories of composition are sufficient, but rather elements of each must be synthesized to address the complex relationship between thought and language. Every writer is embedded in his or her socio-historical context, a specific discourse community defined by its own conventions. Bizzell contends that there is no universal cognitive process by which we all write, but rather that our writing is conditioned by the discourse communities in which we participate.

Bizzell situates her argument for the fundamental importance of the concept of discourse communities by giving an overview of inner-directed and outer-directed models of composition, and then offering a critique of Flower and Hayes’s “hierarchical and recursive” (485) model of the writing process. While she affirms the value of much of Flower and Hayes’s work, Bizzell highlights a key weakness of their theory: they treat writing primarily as problem solving, meaning as preexisting language, and language as a stable set of containers for meaning.

Instead of offering empirical evidence that would undermine Flower and Hayes’s conclusions, Bizzell accepts much of their model, but claims that it lacks explanatory power. Her evidence for this claim involves pointing out that while the Flower-Hayes model describes important elements of the writing process, it cannot explain “why the writer makes certain decisions” (485). Bizzell performs a close reading of Flower and Hayes’s work to show that it is based on a simplistic view of language. She also supports her argument by appealing to Vygotsky’s concept of “verbal thought” (486) and Stanley Fish’s notion of an “interpretive community” (488). As long as one accepts Bizzell’s foundational assumption—“we cannot look at reality in an unfiltered way” (492)—she provides enough evidence to suggest that the Flower-Hayes model only explains one aspect of the writing process and that it should be complemented by the notion of discourse communities.

Bizzell also explains the potential pedagogical payoff of incorporating the idea of discourse communities into the classroom. If Flowers and Hayes believe that most poor writers have trouble setting goals, then Bizzell contends that “these students’ difficulties with goal-setting are better understood in terms of their unfamiliarity with the academic discourse community” (491). Bizzell argues for helping students to understand the conventions that define academic writing, which will give them a better sense of what they are supposed to do when they write their essays. Rather than ask students to “make an argument” or “analyze a text” without any explanation, teachers should first help students recognize the nature of academic discourse and how it differs from their own native discourses. Showing students examples of different texts may help them understand the wide range of discourse communities and identify the conventions by which they operate.

While Bizzell’s conception of learning to write as “joining an unfamiliar discourse community” (488) is extremely useful, it remains fairly abstract. Which conventions of academic discourse are the most important? How might one convey them to students who truly have trouble with the basics of syntax? Bizzell claims that teachers can encourage students to think of themselves as “traveler[s] to an unfamiliar country” (496), who merely need to learn a new language and adopt new cultural norms. Yet, finding oneself in a foreign country is a daunting proposition.

By focusing on discourse, Bizzell reveals an important flaw in Macrorie’s understanding of “good writing.” Macrorie contends that all good writing shares certain general characteristics, that there is an essence to good writing which he calls “truth”: “All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth” (299). He defines good writing as being “clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light” (311). Bizzell would point out that those criteria only acquire meaning in the context of a certain discourse community. Moreover, if one wanted to follow Macrorie’s advice and make one’s writing more “clear” or more “economical,” one could only do so within the constraints established by a certain kind of discourse. As Bizzell says:

Even something as cognitively fundamental as sentence structure takes on meaning from the discourse in which it is deployed. For this reason, for example revising rules are notoriously unhelpful: they always require further knowledge in order to be applied. We can’t “omit needless words” unless we have some additional criteria for “needlessness.” (487)

Making the prose of one’s novel more “clear” and “economical” would be a different task from making the language of an instruction manual more “clear” and “economical.” None of Macrorie’s suggestions can be applied without reference to context, and many of his criteria for good writing would manifest themselves differently in different discourses.

In his review of Jeanette Harris’s Expressive Discourse, Elbow claims that Harris’s book makes two different arguments—the first explicit, the second implicit—which do not necessarily follow from each other. The first is that the term “expressive discourse” is too ambiguous to be useful, and the second is that teachers of writing should not have their students write in an expressive mode. Elbow embraces Harris’s stated aim of establishing a more precise set of labels for different kinds of discourse—“pragmatic,” “aesthetic,” “experience-based,” and “information-based”—but opposes her desire to eliminate expressivist classroom exercises, such as free writing.

Elbow situates his review of Harris’s book in the context of a wider debate about expressive discourse in composition studies. He gives examples of scholars who use the term “expressive” far too loosely, but also defends himself and other expressivist scholars from the charge that they believe expressive discourse is superior to all others. Moreover, he argues that the discipline suffers from “competing paranoias” (937), as both expressivists and anti-expressivists believe they are in an endangered minority.

Elbow offers selected quotations from Harris’s book, as well as a reading of its tone, to support his argument. He uses quotes from Harris to show that her analysis of expressivists is hardly comprehensive and her understanding of intellectual history is oversimplified. Elbow demonstrates that while Harris accuses expressivists of elevating expressive discourse above others, she actually creates a hierarchy among different kinds of discourse by belittling personal narrative and praising information-based discourse. His most persuasive evidence is the dissonance he identifies between Harris’s “detached judicious tone” (934) and the vehemence with which she opposes expressivist pedagogy.

Elbow concludes that the true takeaway from Harris’s book is that students must be taught that each type of discourse is suited to particular audiences, contexts, and rhetorical goals. Giving students this kind of awareness of different modes of writing should be a major priority. Elbow correctly realizes that students will learn this best by employing different kinds of discourse in a range of diverse assignments.

One potential problem with Elbow’s argument is that in seeking greater nuance on certain issues he never settles down on a coherent position. For instance, he both praises Harris’s distinction between “aesthetic” and “pragmatic” discourse and questions whether the distinction is truly valid. Furthermore, he is content with Harris’s “ambivalence or even confusion” (941) about the relationship between what she calls the “interior text” and the final text.” According to Elbow, Harris construes the interior text as an embryonic version of the final text, but also claims that the former is fundamentally non-verbal whereas the latter is verbal. Elbow gladly accepts this tension in the name of the “mysteriousness of how writing issues from the mind” (941). Nuance is great, but appealing to mystery seems like giving up on answering a baffling question.

What is the difference between “pragmatic” and “aesthetic” discourse and between “experience-based” and “information-based” discourse? What is the value of this schema?

Is the “interior text” an embryonic form of the “final text,” or is the former fundamentally non-verbal whereas the latter is verbal? Should this tension remain unresolved?

What is the significance of Elbow’s claim that he and other “expressivists” are motivated by a “renewed interest in invention”?

Why does Elbow value writing for an “audience of self” so much?

Scott Consigny, “Rhetoric and Its Situations”

Consigny’s central claim is that rhetoric is the product of both choices made by the rhetor and the particularities of the situation. The rhetor is neither purely free, nor purely determined by the situation. If the rhetor ignores the context of a given situation his or her speech will fail, but there are myriad possible successful responses to any situation.

Consigny situates this claim in relation to the opposed positions of Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz. He argues that Bitzer and Vatz each form one side of a dichotomy: Bitzer claims that the situation determines what the rhetor can say, whereas Vatz asserts that the rhetor creatively shapes the situation by choosing what information to include or exclude. Consigny offers a mediating position that synthesizes Bitzer and Vatz’s arguments.

To support his argument, Consigny appeals mainly to Aristotle. He uses Aristotle’s distinction between rhetor and expert to show that Bitzer treats rhetoric like problem solving and fails to account for the difference between a rhetor and a scientist. He also uses Bitzer’s own example of a presidential inauguration speech to argue that the rhetorical situation is an “indeterminate context” (178) that does not necessarily control what the rhetor says. Consigny also follows Aristotle in defining rhetoric as an art of topics, which enables the rhetor to determine what is “relevant and persuasive in particular situations” (181). His most persuasive evidence is a series of concrete scenarios—a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1968 and a meeting of Bolsheviks in 1919—which reveal the flaws in Bitzer and Vatz’s positions. One could not address these two groups in the same way, but neither would these scenarios demand only one correct response.

For Consigny, rhetoric is about creating coherence out of chaotic situations. This view of rhetoric is a helpful way of approaching the classroom. Applying Consigny’s model to the classroom suggests that the teacher must seek the most strategic way of shaping the material, so that it will be received well by the students. There may be many effective ways of presenting information, but each will rely on topics for coherent structure.

Consigny’s conception of the topic as “formal opposition of terms” (184), however, seems too limited. In a situation defined by competing values, such as an election, structuring rhetoric around a formal opposition may be effective. Yet, other situations, such as a wedding or funeral, might be better suited to different kinds of rhetorical devices.