WHAT WE ARE BECOMING
Developments in Undergraduate Writing MajorsUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-763-6Contents
Foreword Janice M. Lauer..........................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Forging Connections Among Undergraduate Writing Majors Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty......................................................................................11 A Major in Flexibility Rebecca de Wind Mattingly and Patricia Harkin...........................................................................................................................132 Redefining the Undergraduate English Writing Major: An Integrated Approach at a Small Comprehensive University Randy Brooks, Peiling Zhao, and Carmella Braniger...............................323 Restorying Disciplinary Relationships: The Development of an Undergraduate Writing Concentration Lisa Langstraat, Mike Palmquist, and Kate Kiefer..............................................504 Outside the English Department: Oakland University's Writing Program and the Writing and Rhetoric Major Wallis May Andersen....................................................................675 "Between the idea and the reality ... falls the Shadow": The Promise and Peril of a Small College Writing Major Kelly Lowe and William Macauley................................................816 The Writing Major as Shared Commitment Rodney F. Dick..........................................................................................................................................987 Dancing with Our Siblings: The Unlikely Case for a Rhetoric Major David Beard..................................................................................................................1308 Writing Program Development and Disciplinary Integrity: What's Rhetoric Got to Do with It? Lori Baker and Teresa Henning.......................................................................1539 Remembering the Canons' Middle Sisters: Style, Memory, and the Return of the Progymnasmata in the Liberal Arts Writing Major Dominic F. Delli Carpini and Michael J. Zerbe.....................17710 Civic Rhetoric and the Undergraduate Major in Rhetoric and Writing Thomas A. Moriarty and Greg Giberson........................................................................................20411 Composing Multiliteracies and Image: Multimodal Writing Majors for a Creative Economy Joddy Murray.............................................................................................21712 Not Just Another Pretty Classroom Genre: The Uses of Creative Nonfiction in the Writing Major Celest Martin....................................................................................22513 The Writing Arts Major: A Work in Process Jennifer Courtney, Deb Martin, and Diane Penrod......................................................................................................24314 "What Exactly is This Major?" Creating Disciplinary Identity through an Introductory Course Sanford Tweedie, Jennifer Courtney, and William I. Wolff...........................................26015 Toward a Description of Undergraduate Writing Majors Lee Campbell and Debra Jacobs.............................................................................................................277Afterword Susan H. McLeod.........................................................................................................................................................................287About the Contributors.............................................................................................................................................................................290
Chapter One
A MAJOR INFLEXIBILITY Rebecca de Wind Mattingly Patricia Harkin
In this essay our argument will be that a post-disciplinary major in rhetoric and composition is a particularly good idea for research-intensive universities in the current technological and fiscal states of affairs. We shall describe the benefits such a major would potentially offer to contemporary students, to the faculty members who teach them, to tertiary institutions (especially state-sponsored ones) in general, and even to multinational capital. We shall also necessarily describe the institutional impedimenta that such an innovation is likely to encounter. Finally, we describe a course that might serve as the entry to such a major at research-intensive universities.
We begin by emphasizing that our argument is for rhetoric and composition as a major-not as a discipline. Historical and theoretical arguments about disciplinary status for rhetoric have already been made by many scholars and critics from many points of view (Lauer, Mailloux, Harkin, North, Sosnoski), and it is not our intention to rehearse them here. Our concern is institutional: As Steven Mailloux observes in Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition, "academic disciplines are hierarchically organized, institutionally supported, self-perpetuating networks of practices for knowledge production and transmission.... That is, disciplines are, fundamentally, the transformation of practical wisdom into accredited techniques" (2006, 5). In one sense, of course, the network of practices that such scholars as Sharon Crowley, Victor Vitanza, Susan Miller, Richard Lanham, Susan Jarratt, Michael Leff, and Chaim Perelman have called "rhetoric" has existed since the fifth century BCE. The transmission of those practices, however, has occurred in such diverse institutional venues as departments of English, speech, communication, journalism, media studies, classics, political science, schools of business, and online instruction in winning friends and influencing people. In most research-intensive universities, no single institutional venue has been the locus in which the practical wisdom known as rhetoric is transformed into accredited techniques.
Techniques become "accredited" through institutions such as departments, curricula, and majors. In most research-intensive universities, it is not currently possible for an undergraduate to earn a baccalaureate degree in rhetoric and composition in a department of that name. One can be an English major with a writing emphasis or a communication major who concentrates on composing and analyzing "speeches." One can be a literature major with an affection for "rhetoric" as Paul de Man used the term in the 1970s and '80s. One can get an MA or PhD in rhetoric and composition. And one can get an undergraduate degree in journalism or writing for the media.
Our argument is that rhetoric and composition should have an institutional space-a tenured and tenurable faculty, adequate office space, a budget, a copy machine, and at least one administrative assistant. In that way, (and perhaps only in that way) within the university's own symbolic system of value, rhetoric and composition can be understood not only as a service but also as an institutionally constituted area of inquiry.
Because its networks of practices are not available to undergraduates as a single major under that name, rhetoric (and composition) lacks the status that comes in the academy from a unique budget and the other aforementioned perquisites. That prestige, or lack of it, is noticed and felt on the pulses of undergraduate students. It is also felt by faculty members in all departments. In the departments of English and communication, however, the lack of status has important implications. It is, we think, the overwhelming tendency among English faculty in research-oriented universities to think of writing as a service and rhetoric as an attempt to graft a research agenda onto this service. In departments of communication oriented toward social science, on the other hand, writing is often ignored (or minimized) and rhetoric regarded as a remnant of the bad old days before new media studies. Administrators notice that the emphasis on writing is more often than not lip service. And so they relegate rhetoric to the back burners of their development agendas, as something different from-and less than-a "real" major.
We believe that a major in rhetoric and composition would change attitudes toward writing and rhetoric on the part of students and faculty by demonstrating (with cash) that the university believes writing and rhetoric are important enough to support. It would provide research-oriented universities with data for arguments that they are addressing the crises in literacy that are decried by media and government at regular intervals (as well as with an opportunity actually to address the problems underlying those calls of "crisis"). It would also provide corporate capital with employees who are aware that differing situations call for differing approaches and appeals.
STUDENTS
First, focusing on rhetoric and composition is a good idea for students who are thought of as "problem writers," especially, to offer only one example, when their "problems" occur (or are seen) as a consequence of technology. Students who successfully navigate text messages, e-mails, blog entries, online forums, and the like, tend, in more formal, traditional situations such as the environment of work, to produce writing that audiences (in those spheres) judge as underdeveloped, lacking in transitions, and often orthographically and syntactically "incorrect." Hence, the authors of these messages are characterized as underprepared.
The reasons for this characterization are obvious: e-mail, texts, and the like are typically produced without extensive revision, for a specific recipient (frequently unnamed and not noted by the author beyond pressing the "reply" button) who can be presumed to know what the author is talking about, based on previous, recent-in-memory communications the two have shared. Successful examples of these kinds of written exchanges rely on brevity, so no time is wasted reestablishing the context for the utterance or expressing the niceties of polite address. Dates and times are provided by the device or program used to compose the message, so the author is relieved of the burden of noting those crucial tools for reconstructing text conversations. In short, these technologies of writing de-emphasize the articulation of context and quite thoroughly excise conscious acknowledgement of the audience from the written artifact itself.
The authors of these kinds of computer-enabled utterances develop skills that serve them admirably so long as they remain in the technological sphere, communicating with like-minded acquaintances who are well-acculturated in the digital domain. The writers' difficulties arise when they are thrust into formal letter or memo writing, proposal or report construction, sales-pitch-drafting, or other, more professional, writing scenes. More critically for our purposes, technology-sphere writing habits become problematic when students are expected to enter disciplinary discussions in their first-year classes. In these situations, audiences may sometimes require elaborate articulations of context (such as the "literature review" of a social science research report), while on other occasions they require writers to assume that the sender and receiver are both already in the discourse. Professional writing sometimes requires direct attention to the intended recipients of the message while at other times demands rhetoric general enough for Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1969) universal audience. Writers from the technological sphere have minimal practice in providing such audience analysis. Frustrated readers interpret the lack of these crucial aspects of the writing in formal, traditional genres as a lack of skill or capability, and they punish the writer accordingly with their inattention or disapprobation.
It's an obvious statement, but one that the ease, speed, and copiousness of computer-enabled writing seems frequently to mask: Students who don't get enough exercise in paying attention to context and audience in their native forms of computer-enabled writing are more likely to fail to meet the needs of context- and address-sensitive audiences in the types of writing situations encountered in college and the workplace. Margaret Gonzales (2007) asserts that, "[Students'] written literacy skills may be defined by their use of instant messaging and text messaging, where abbreviated and context-free is the norm.... A writing major would help them learn that written communication comes in many forms, and those forms are determined by context, audience, and purpose for writing. Communicating with your boss in writing is not going to be the same as communicating with your friend."
What a rhetoric and composition major can do is introduce students to a broad range of situations that call for what Bill Hart-Davidson characterizes as "solving problems by writing." These situations require conscious attention to audience and context in ways technology-sphere natives may not otherwise encounter. For the students who have been labeled as underperformers in formal, traditional writing situations, the classes they would take as rhetoric and composition majors could help them leverage their native competencies in concise, reactive composition to address the concerns their teachers and employers have about their writing skills in more formal and professional spheres.
A rhetoric and composition major is also a good idea for contemporary students who are thought of as good writers. "Good" student writers often earn that acclaim because they are facile with traditional elements of "correctness." Such students need to expand their sense of writing beyond the simple correctness that characterizes many secondary and even college English programs. For these students, a rhetoric and composition major would provide an opportunity to understand rhetoric as a multidisciplinary field of study into questions about "what happens when human beings make texts," rather than merely as a "service" to other departments in the university and to the students in general.
A major in rhetoric and composition is a good idea for the many, many students who attend four-year colleges or universities for the same reasons students attend community colleges and technical institutions and for the same reasons they participate in online programs: to gain certification in skills they understand themselves to need to secure employment.
For example, in a 1999 survey of reasons University of Colorado students chose to attend college, that university found that, "When just the most important reason [for attending college] is considered, by far, the two most often cited reasons to attend college are to gain skills or knowledge for a job, graduate school, or later in life and needing a degree to get a good job or go to graduate school; together, two-thirds (66 [percent]) of students mentioned one of these two reasons as most important" (Office of Planning, Budget, and Analysis, University of Colorado at Boulder 2001; emphasis in original). An informal survey we conducted of a dozen or so colleagues and friends gave similar results: When asked how important certain considerations were to them when they started going to college, three-quarters of them said the "requirements for a career you preferred" and "interest in making more money by qualifying for a better job" were somewhat or very important to them. In contrast, less than a third of them cited "Interest in making a lasting contribution to the world of knowledge" as similarly important to them.
In acknowledging the importance students place on getting job skills out of their college and university experiences, we bring to light another reason an undergraduate major in rhetoric and composition would be a good idea: students specifically stipulate that they want practical, wage-earning proficiency in real-world abilities like composing employee reviews, documenting processes, charting progress, crafting effective proposals, writing press releases, developing advertising campaigns, and so forth. Providing a rhetoric and composition major would allow schools to offer a system of classes in writing that would prepare students to meet those kinds of writing challenges appropriately and effectively because students would understand theories of persuasion and argument. Students would likely be receptive to selecting such a major because of their hopes of gaining authority or higher salaries in work situations through impressing employers with their competence.
Although all of the skills we have just enumerated are already available to students as courses and parts of courses in English, communication, business administration, and so forth, they are, in most research universities, not available as an undergraduate major. The message that students inevitably receive is that these skills are not important enough to constitute a major. A rhetoric and composition major can introduce students to the notion that writing is not simply a tool through which content is transmitted (unchanged) from sender to receiver but rather an area of study-a topic about which research is being conducted. A major (as against a required course) in rhetoric and composition would attract students who like to write and who want to learn about writing's processes. Too often, in required first-year writing courses, teachers are inclined to skip the theoretical accounts of writing in favor of offering instruction in specific assignments-whether those assignments are part of a project of fostering community literacy, "inventing the university," or finding and expressing a self. As described by the editors of this volume, a rhetoric and composition major would include courses in, for example, journalism and media writing, professional writing forms, aesthetic forms such as poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and so forth. Our point is that the major would attract persons who are interested in those forms and the differences among them. The very fact of there being a rhetoric and composition major would increase the prestige of writing courses, whether they were required or not. Further, this rising tide would be likely to lift all boats. Even students who "don't do well in English" would, we think, be inclined to notice that people who do like to write are employable. At the moment, in our research university, students tend to think that there are no jobs for English majors.
It does not seem to us that such a major would inevitably pander to consumerism. Rather, we think it appropriate for a course of study to prepare students for situations they are likely to encounter in the world. There is a difference, however, between instruction in specific forms (the memo, the proposal, the sales pitch, and so forth) and instruction in attention to context and audience (even if/when those forms are the examples).
Much current, curricular thinking holds that students arrive at the university with assumptions about writing that are no longer valid at the college level. These assumptions include, for example:
That language is merely an instrument for pointing to knowledge that has already been made or discovered.
That manipulating words and sentences has little effect on the knowledge to which these words and sentences point.
That the manipulation of these words and sentences is governed by rules that students learn in English classes. The knowledge itself, however, resides in other departments.
By contrast, a rhetoric and composition major would demonstrate to students that language is an instrument through which knowledge is made discursively.
FACULTY
Additionally, a rhetoric and composition major is a good idea for research-university faculty because it represents an institutional way of interrogating tacit assumptions about language that lurk beneath many faculty complaints about student writing. Like students, faculty in sciences and social sciences often (in our view) carry an unexamined, positivistic view of language.
(Continues...)
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