Writing as Writing

Jim Seitz, Mariolina Salvatori, and David Bartholomae gave the sort of brilliant panel that one would expect from the caliber of their past scholarship, offering a set of presentations on understanding student writing as writing. Their session’s apparently tautologically simple title opened up a series of carefully reasoned critiques and generous explorations of the close ways in which we read (and ought to read) student papers: to be blunt, it was the best session I’ve seen at CCCC so far, this year or last.

Unfortunately, I was so taken by Mariolina’s examination of how pieces of a student’s writing resisted her interpretation, in a series of close readings and theoretical reflections leading towards a conclusion from Gadamer and Heidegger on the hermeneutics of reading, that I utterly neglected to take notes while she was speaking. Only slightly less entranced by Seitz and Bartholomae, I nevertheless managed to take much better notes, which I offer here.

Seitz begins from the semi-poststructuralist understanding (I didn’t catch the name of the theorist he cited, but I’m probably going to e-mail him and ask him) that we cannot know those to whom we write, they cannot know us, we cannot know ourselves, and further that we put things we don’t anticipate in our communications to others, and others read things into those communications that may not be there. However, Seitz suggests, composition continues to act as if these gaps, misreadings, and communicative false steps don’t exist at all. We function under an “ideology of the communicative” by which perfect understanding, neutral consent, and discursive continuity are the bedrock upon which any future agreements or disagreements must rest. Seitz asks: so how might we resist this “communicative ideology” and its concomitant notion that all communication is an attempt to persuade someone that we’ve understood their communication?

As a move towards such resistance, Seitz takes James Slevin’s suggestion that we “see difficulties as differences” in student writing. If we shift our ways of seeing, we can see new principles of organization and new ways of thinking; we can recognize a different sense of what constitutes a thick or nuanced argument. In service of this point, Seitz gives a wonderful and insightful list of the generalizations made within an example student paper, effectively recuperating a generous and intelligent reading, arguing from the list’s evidence that — while the paper is not necessarily effective as an instance of academic writing — there’s evidence that the careful act of reflective thinking that undergirds any academic writing is already underway.

Bartholomae starts with the remarkable assertion that “generic, inevitable, predictable” can be terms of success, not failure, when referring to student writing. A student’s writing — a composition — is the laboratory within which that student works on her writing, writing which (as a practice rather than an individual composition) is always under revision. In this sense, student writing — as writing that goes through close and careful reading and revision — is different (although not necessarily separate from) the writing that goes on in school. Not all writing that goes on in school necessarily involves close reading or careful intellectual work.

He then makes the rather pointed remark that the desire to explicitly address political issues as a function of composition within the context of a 14-week course is rather cynical, and suggests that attempts for political change might benefit much more from careful attention to detail than from making grand or sweeping claims. Bartholomae concludes by worrying that composition as a field has lost its close function on revision and its formerly careful attention to student writing as writing.

It’s a convincing critique.