Donna gave me some sharp rhetorically-oriented feedback on my micro-faux-prospectus recently. The most useful question she asked: who do I think this dissertation is for? I mean, all along, I’d been thinking to myself, “It’s for the committee, Mike; that’s all you need to worry about,” and totally ignoring my own field’s useful heuristics: understanding audience will determine your arguments and evidence, grasshopper. Now I’ve been relying on the conventional wisdom that the maximum effective range of a dissertation, unless you’re someone like Albert Kitzhaber, is the interview to which it gets you, and perhaps beyond that your initial monograph, which means that my short-range thinking has been that I’m only writing for myself and my committee. Which in itself is pretty foolish, given the existence of this weblog, and the fact that you’re reading this, and the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to get insightful comments from you and people like you who’ve stopped by and had lots of smart things to say. Beyond that, it’s also pretty foolish given all my adulation of John Trimbur’s recent work on the circulation of writing, and how much I like what the much-missed Father Ong had to say about how The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction. Donna suggests that I construct a disciplinary audience, and use that to inform my arguments: how do these components of class, computers, and composition fit together in relation to their various possible audiences? Am I making an argument to scholars in computers and composition that they need to follow the lead of the broader field in examining class issues? If so, I’ll start from a certain point and invoke certain arguments and lay them out in certain ways that may be very different from the ways I might write if I’m attempting to demonstrate to composition scholars that technology itself does certain things that have a significant effect on the interactions of class and writing pedagogy.
So who do I want to argue to? That’s easy. Disclosure of ego and vanity: I think this stuff is important, and I want other people to think so too, the more the better. I want to aim this at the broader field of composition; I don’t want this to be just a specialist thing. And I think that such an impulse might usefully mesh with technologizing trends in education, too.
Dear Mike,
Why don’t you make your implied reader Chris?
The rest of us can look over your shoulder.
Seriously, the notion of “split addressee” might get you through some of the tight spots where the who questions arises. As well, the split addressee nature of blogging for friends and strangers is a wonderful way to practice the discipline of parking the pieces that may not make it into the disertation. All your, yes, your readers are not together in the same reading space. Frequent reminders that this is the case should help ease the pressure.
Chris seems to be diligent in reminding you. Very valuable the actual and implied reader that reminds the writers that the work of writing is never done even if the paragraph finds its end.
f.
“So who do I want to argue to? That’s easy. Disclosure of ego and vanity: I think this stuff is important, and I want other people to think so too, the more the better. I want to aim this at the broader field of composition; I don’t want this to be just a specialist thing.”
And what is the argument? That they should read what you have read, or some of it, on writing and social class? But what is the payoff? What is the benefit of having read that material? How is their practice to be improved? How will their students benefit?
For example, I teach, or have taught, sales to people from all walks of life. How can your understanding of writing and class improve how I get them to write sales talks, in prose or powerpoint? Or, how can what you have learned help teachers produce better speech writers, copy editors, ad writers, memo writers?
Or are you after something else? Like cultural literacy, self-understanging through writing, subversion of cliches and propaganda, by understanding its mechanisms?
What results among real students could be expected by those who follow your lead?
Intrigued as to how the H-tutor bends the question of who towards creating return on investment for the reader. I think one could begin with the writer: two reasons for writing: writing to explore and writing to communicate. The “who of purpose” is internalized in the person of the writer. Some writing is moving words and letters and clusters of words and letters to explore the expressive power of language or chart some semantic waters. Other writing reports back on such oftentimes hermetic meanderings and plungings into murk. So, the writers writes to think and writes to tell of that thinking. ROI or not. Writing is like planting corn to see what the seed will produce and to produce more seed. It is a dynamic not necessarily captured in the rhetoric of investment.
Writing as a sort of divestment?