Preterition

I first read Cicero’s Pro Milone with his famous question cui bono? decades ago. Clodius had Cicero exiled and his house burned down; when Milo’s gang killed Clodius and Milo was tried for the murder, Cicero took up Milo’s defense. At the trial, Cicero saw Pompey’s soldiers, squeaked through a fraction of his speech, and fled. Milo was convicted. Cicero later sent him a polished version of the un-delivered oration, and Milo, Dio reports, wrote back from exile that had Cicero delivered, he wouldn’t now be eating such good fish in Massilia. A self-account, perfected after the verdict, arriving where it can change nothing.

I’ve lately been thinking about the opposite question from Cicero’s: who pays?

The exit comment

I shared a faculty office at West Point with a military officer, and on my departures for the classroom, MAJ Bounds would say with mock solemnity, “Go touch some lives, Doctor Edwards.” Her irony was only half a joke: certainly, we took our jobs teaching first-year composition seriously—it’s enormously rewarding work, and intensely labor-consuming—but cadets’ lives are often touched by much more than English 101. The intensity of some mentoring relationships at USMA parallel the intensity of some mentoring relationships in graduate study. More generally, I think we know professors are invested in the growth of students, and pedagogical relationships are relations of persuasion.

I’ve come to think the Major’s line was funny for another reason: the claim can’t be checked. Part of the appeal of teaching is the regular classroom interaction, but past that span of fifteen weeks, teachers seldom know if or how a life gets touched in English 101. Writing teachers have instruments to narrow the gap. The writing portfolio with process work and the reflective cover letter asks the student to report the touch as received, and to write it for the person who will grade the report. That strikes me as an odd thing to want.

What follows is an attempt to figure out why it’s odd, what it costs, and who pays.

Writing teachers are familiar with the practice named by Summer Smith (1997), who examined a substantial set of teachers’ closing comments on student papers and found a genre: praise first, then the criticism, then encouragement and next steps. Once the moves are conventional they get decoded as moves: teachers call it the “shit sandwich.” The student learns the praise is the wrapper and the criticism is the substance, skips to the substance, and teachers can never write their way out, because whatever they write gets read through the genre. The praise is legal to inscribe and skimmed on the way to the substance, which the student reads as a list of mistakes to correct.

Readings as ratings

The end comment fails to present itself to students as a reading because it’s also (implicitly or explicitly) a rating. A reading that’s also a rating can’t be received as a reading. Let me offer an axiom stated as a property of a relation rather than of anyone in it—that last part is important later:

Where disclosure poses more risk for one party than for the other, the exposed party’s text stops being readable as a report and becomes readable only as a move.

The source is James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990); I got to it by way of Shadi Bartsch’s Actors in the Audience (1994), which I’ve talked about here before. An unequal distribution of power, Scott writes, “invariably introduces an element of acting into the behavior of at least one of the participants,” and dominance is “not having to act, or, more accurately, the capacity to be more negligent and casual about any single performance” (Bartsch 1994, 11–12, quoting Scott 1990, 28–29). Note that Scott makes an incidence claim, not a psychological one, and states who bears the cost of the performance, not what bearing that cost means or feels like. Scott, through Bartsch, argues that “any analysis based exclusively on the public transcript is likely to conclude that subordinate groups endorse the terms of their subordination and are willing, even enthusiastic, partners in that subordination” (Bartsch 1994, 151, quoting Scott 1990, 4). Put “reflective letter” for “public transcript” and “found the process valuable” for “endorse,” and one has the evidentiary situation of a portfolio assessed for growth.

Foundational cognitive research on composing offers a related finding. Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (1987) distinguish knowledge telling from knowledge transforming in their opening chapter and insist that the two are processes, not properties of texts, contending that readers “cannot tell by reading this chapter whether we have engaged in problem-solving and knowledge-transforming operations while writing it or whether we have simply written down content that was already stored in memory” (13). Their concluding chapter goes further. To say that a given person or group is incapable of strategically pursuing goals in writing “would be foolhardy,” they write. “We cannot imagine any way of validating such a claim. . . . What can be shown is that some people exhibit very little evidence of goal-directed planning in writing” (339). Evidence-of must be distinguished from possession-of. Chapter 1 says no one can tell; chapter 14 says no one has a method.

Bereiter and Scardamalia are blunt about the deficit: knowledge telling is “self-limiting” (357), and “it is failure on the intentional side that leaves students enchained by circumstance” (361). The developmental difference is real, but it lives in the composing, and the text does not carry it.

The reflective letter asks the teacher to do what the process movement’s early scholarship says had no validation procedure, read a composing process off a text, and then attach a grade to or near the result. Using written metacognition to promote knowledge transfer becomes an assessed performance.

Another instance of men online thinking about the Roman Empire

I suggested here in 2004 that composition had taken its classical inheritance from Quintilian’s idealism and ignored the darker views of Tacitus. Bartsch examines how theatricality, in her words, “makes actors out of human beings placed in situations in which they feel themselves watched,” their performance evaluated by a superior who has to be watched in turn (1994, 10–11). Those characteristics may belong to a classroom.

Bartsch notes how Nero kept five thousand professional applauders, the Augustiani, and the sources describe how the rest of the audience would mime the clappers, aping delight and echoing their words verbatim (8). Observe what’s false in that theater. Not the labor: the applause was work performed by the Augustiani. The inference from the visible sign to the interior is false. The historian Cassius Dio has Nero, hearing nothing true from those around him and seeing everyone praise what he’d done, come to believe that even his murder of his mother Agrippina had gone unnoticed or approved (25–26): the assessor corrupted by the performance he compels. Scott is perhaps generous to note that “what may look from above like the extraction of a required performance can easily look from below like the artful manipulation of deference and flattery to achieve its own ends” (Bartsch 1994, 23, quoting Scott 1990, 34). The student who writes the reflection the rubric wants fails nothing; she’s exercising a competence.

Tacitus took distance instead: the Dialogus sets its quarrel about eloquence a generation prior, in the voices of historical figures, and Maternus’s closing praise of the emperor is the safety that lets Tacitus deny everyone’s critical intent, his own included (125). Distance buys deniability, not candor, the opposite of a readable trace. Candor bought with irrelevance is an end comment on a dead draft. The guard can’t be moved farther off. Once doublespeak is a known strategy, Bartsch concludes, all praise grows more suspect, ever more likely to be taken as its opposite (147).

The benevolent reader

Pliny’s Panegyricus to the emperor Trajan offers, in Bartsch’s descriptiopn, an obsessive attempt to prove its own sincerity (149), and carries its own concession: pretense, Pliny admits, invents more ingeniously than truth (55.2; 158). The coerced performance is the more elaborate one. The senators, Bartsch argues, behaved toward the tyrant Domitian outwardly much as they now behave toward the benevolent Trajan; what differs is the psychology of the rulers. Domitian knew the gap between his nature and the praise and suspected it. Trajan, less corrupted than Domitian, believes. To read the praise as performance is to condemn oneself—“to see a slur is to prove it true”—so it falls to the emperor to mandate the speaker’s sincerity by declining to doubt it (161). Trajan isn’t vain; he’s decent, and his decency is what disables the reading. A teacher who reads the reflective letter as a performance indicts herself as the teacher who produces performances. In print, writing teachers generally choose not to perform the reading.

Following Syme and Giovannini, Bartsch shows Pliny owing his career to the emperor he called a monster, in offices his letters never mention (167–69); no poor training, Syme notes, for a man who hoped one day to deliver his own thanks to Caesar. Composition scholars have written assessed essays, then examined dissertations, then tenure files, and serve as the senior figures asking for the self-account of a reflective cover letter. We should not read the Pliny figured in Bartsch’s chapter as a villain: rather, he’s trapped. He writes a letter (Epistles 6.27) admitting he avoided the appearance of flattery not out of frankness but because he’d grasped that the ruler wanted nothing said under compulsion. Bartsch suggests “the highest form of flattery is to appear to be frank” (180), and Pliny’s own terms sharpen the contrast: in place of species adulationis, the appearance of flattery, he adopts species libertatis, the appearance of a free man’s outspokenness (180). The student who writes “I know this is a genre; here’s my real process” is performing frankness, and the reader who takes it as real is a Trajan. The wish under every process-tracking scheme hides behind Pliny’s wish Trajan would look into private houses, since only that could prove the praise sincere; Pliny adds that no rulers inquire into our private lives except the ones we hate (153). A guilt regime’s confession, demanded inside a shame regime’s theater.

What the portfolio sells

The portfolio conceals nothing. It renders a great deal of real work partially, and the partial rendering is what gets compensated. The defect is denomination, not deception. I offer here a defense of process pedagogy, not an attack: the writing process is not the commodity. (At least not necessarily so, for the purposes of this analysis: see Bruce Horner’s work.) The portfolio is the commodity. A student’s essay and a professional’s can be textually identical and economically different, because the student’s is the site of a transformation the professional’s isn’t. The portfolio operates as the field’s attempt to build an instrument for valuing labor it otherwise cannot see.

Note how composition scholarship describes the need. The remedy for the arbitrary topic and the error-hunting reader was to make the writing meaningful, and meaningfulness got defined as a link the instructor sees between the student’s interior and the writing to be undertaken. That’s the access claim from the teacher, posed as a virtue. Bereiter and Scardamalia saw the trouble in 1987: “mature writers are able to make writing tasks meaningful for themselves and that this is part of their competence” (360), so doing it for the student retains a competence that was supposed to be transferred. They ask “whether the best environment for writing is one in which things are continually made meaningful by others” (360–61). Add the half they don’t state, that the way the teacher makes it meaningful is by claiming the link to the interior, and it becomes two moves rather than one. The teacher keeps the meaning-making competence and takes the interior as its raw material.

It’s a conflict of interest. Certainly it’s proper and fitting for teachers to want the reward of getting to touch some lives. But if that’s the teacher’s reward, it isn’t a thing students should be assessed upon by that teacher. The assessor can’t judge the growth narrative disinterestedly, because the narrative’s content is the assessor’s own efficacy. That’s Trajan.

The discourse manages the contradiction by figuring the student in a particular way. We ask students to reflect honestly on their process; we invite them to take ownership of their growth; we design the portfolio so the writer’s development becomes visible. Read those sentences for their assumptions and the student they describe is pre-economic, truthful, and compliant: disclosure costs her nothing, her report is a report and not a move, and her performance of the process is an endorsement of it. Each of those is an access clause.

Credence goods seen from the inside

From the student’s side, the process work serves as a credence good: its payoff can only be assessed against a counterfactual she will never hold, the writer she’d have been without it. In an exchange, labor is a cost. Bereiter and Scardamalia decline to rank their two models: knowledge transforming “cannot be claimed to have an absolute advantage” in quality of writing or in benefit to the writer (29), because putting what one knows into words transforms it too, and because the effect “depends on the topic and how it happens to connect to the writer’s knowledge,” on the form, and on “transitory states of feeling and concern” (360). Every one of these is a contingency invisible to the reader. The assessor can’t price the episode and neither can the student: that’s a credence good encountered from the inside. Bereiter and Scardamalia also refuse the teacher’s favored misattribution from within: writing behavior “usually attributed to deficiencies of skill or knowledge, faulty motivation, and the like” can be accounted for, they argue, “by a coherent procedure that runs according to reasonable rules” (24).

Expressivism tried to lower the cost of disclosure, implicitly conceding that disclosure has a cost. Its critics disputed whether the disclosed self was real, not whether disclosing it was costly: both sides agreed there was a cost and neither priced it.

The field’s wins are real. Composition has improved since Dartmouth: away from error-hunting and toward reader awareness taught as a learnable strategy, in Linda Flower’s (1979) reader-based prose and its descendants, rather than rewarded in the students who’d absorbed the conventions from a childhood of reading. That improvement was a redistribution of access to legibility, and it worked. Then the field installed an instrument that redistributes the cost of legibility in the other direction, onto the student, unpriced. The achievement and the blind spot are one operation run in opposite directions on the same axis. What reproduces, generation to generation, is a role and not an error, and Pliny provides the case as the most sophisticated reader of flattery in the room, for whom knowing provided no escape.

The teacher says the value is in the doing. The student hears that the cost is in the doing. Both are right, and nothing in the room prices the second. The credit hour prices her time; nothing prices the disclosure.

The reader, read back

Some forms of process documentation don’t convert. Mariolina Salvatori’s difficulty paper (1996) operates as process writing unscored by the reader; the evidence circulates between writer and reader instead of up to an assessor, so it never becomes a rating. The variable Salvatori isolates is reciprocity, not distance: whether the reader’s own reading is placed where it can be contested. Rome provides an anchor: Trajan in the circus, Pliny says, lets himself be watched back (Paneg. 51.4; Bartsch 1994, 33).

The odd part is that the process tradition already knows this. Bereiter and Scardamalia’s closing recommendations are the reflective letter’s charter: competence “should be a clear goal in the minds of the students and not only in the mind of the teacher,” one way to get there is “to involve students in investigations of their own strategies and knowledge” (363), and the aim is to impart “those kinds of competence that have previously been reserved to the teacher” (362). So I’m not saying the reflective letter betrayed the tradition: it was the tradition’s own proposal. What changed is not the practice but the reader. And in fairness to the reader, I run a process-tracking system on my own writing, described here recently, that works because its writer and its reader are the same person and nobody grades it—a hand-authored dashboard vouching for itself, by my last post’s rule about projection and authorship.

Who pays to be read

Every remedy on offer increases presumed legibility: a better rubric, a more honest prompt, a fuller trace, a reflection on the reflection. Every remedy gets installed by the party for whom disclosure is cheaper, so each improves the reading and worsens the asymmetry in the same proportion. The answer is not more transparency. The variable is who bears the cost of being legible.

I’ve been circling three questions here: how improvement should be assessed, what should be assessed, and what the student is entitled to say back. I can answer only one. Improvement can’t be assessed by its alleged cause; the assessor is the party the growth narrative credits, and Trajan cannot read that letter. Whatever gets assessed is renameable, and the assessor picks the name. But the student’s entitlement draws support from Scott: she’s entitled to perform, and the performance is a competence, skilfully exercised. That isn’t a consolation prize; it’s the reason I won’t end by offering a better instrument. Bartsch’s Pliny is what happens to the person who does.

Everything above can be read as a story about people. In Barton’s words, the Romans had faces and a “body politic. . . . regulated by the warm physical glow of the blush” (2001, 19). The student has a job and twelve years of learning about what gets graded. If the performance belongs to the person, the remedy is psychological and this post is merely a complaint.

I don’t think it does. The proof: there now exists a technological version of the relation with nothing inside it—a large language model has no face, no job, no shame—and its workings have begun to be measured.

References

Barton, Carlin A. 2001. Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bartsch, Shadi. 1994. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bereiter, Carl, and Marlene Scardamalia. 1987. The Psychology of Written Composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Flower, Linda. 1979. “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing.” College English 41 (1): 19–37.

Horner, Bruce. 2000. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Salvatori, Mariolina. 1996. “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition.” College English 58 (4): 440–54.

Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Smith, Summer. 1997. “The Genre of the End Comment: Conventions in Teacher Responses to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 48 (2): 249–68.