Preterition

Two notebooks

I started writing, really writing regularly, on the bus. I was a brand-new graduate student at Pitt going to night classes on payments from the GI Bill at the campus on Forbes Avenue and temping 9 to 5 as an admin assistant at Mellon Bank downtown. I’d read on the PAT M71 in the morning, write during lunch, write on the bus ride to class in the evening. The temp agency metered my days by the wage hour and the university my evenings by the credit hour; the writing happened in the gaps between the two meters, on the bus and over lunch. After class and dinner I’d do more reading and writing. Encountering Mariolina Salvatori’s work on reading and writing and difficulty provided my unformed scholarly practices with an initial lifeline and a set of questions. I later took an independent study elective with Mariolina, who helped me focus those questions into ones that persist today.

Salvatori asks students to divide a notebook into columns for three written moves. Students write their response to a text; then “a reflective commentary on the moves they made as readers” and the reasons for those moves; then an assessment of what their reading produced—her adaptation, she says, of Berthoff’s double-entry journal (Salvatori 1996, 446–47). Berthoff’s dialectical notebook consists of facing pages, “offering a structure which enables the student to talk to herself” (Berthoff [1984] 2003, 340): observations on one side, comments on the observations on the other, and the dialogue between the two, Berthoff argues, is where the thinking happens. So you can see something interesting already going on there. The assigned text stays outside the notebook, and every column is the student’s own, each written at a different point in time: Salvatori’s first two columns do the work of Berthoff’s facing pages, the response to the text and the commentary on the moves that produced it, and her third adds what Berthoff’s notebook doesn’t have, the student’s assessment of what the reading produced, written looking back at the other two. All of that is useful information.

I secured a teaching assistantship my second year at Pitt and quit taking the M71 up Forbes, but the habit stayed. When I get stuck with a scholarly reading, my first move is still to write out how and why I’m struggling with it. I’ve promoted Salvatori’s difficulty paper to every writing teacher and graduate student I know. With Salvatori, students write a page specifying the difficulty a passage in a text posed, and the class reads each difficulty not as evidence of a reader’s shortcomings but as “a feature of the text demanding to be critically engaged rather than ignored”; furthermore, and crucially, she finds the description of the difficulty almost inevitably already contains the interpretive move needed to handle it (448). I brought Salvatori to Spokane as a response to what she names as the field’s erasures, our turning away from how students read and from the individual student in the moment of reading. The challenge, Salvatori writes, is making careful introspective reading possible “within the time and institutional constraints that bind us” (446). Salvatori’s are excellent procedures: I’ve taught both. They survived because they fit fifteen weeks. In Certification by Plan I argued that the credit hour sized the paper, the notebook and the portfolio to the course.

Stock and flow

Put the notebook next to the box and the difference is duration. The slip-box is a stock. Notes produce notes, the way commodities produce commodities; the addresses are permanent; it runs for an undemarcated span, and, as Sönke Ahrens puts it, “nothing in this box would ever get thrown away” (Ahrens 2017, sec. 6). The notebook is a stock too, but one with an expiry date: it accumulates for fifteen weeks, and then the portfolio liquidates it. The portfolio is a flow, milled for the exchange of the grade: a reduced, linearized version of a slip-box excerpted into a narrative, a tiny filetree of its own, the semester’s commonplaces organized and made tidy into a digestible commodity. Freewriting, the field’s other widely known invention procedure, offers flow at the smallest scale: ten minutes, no stopping, whatever comes. Composition teaches the flow. Ahrens markets the stock.

Two behaviorisms

In December 1985, in CCC, Robert Boice—a behaviorist who put himself in Skinner’s line, and who treated blocked academic writers for a living—observed that “the prescriptions of composition researchers seem to apply only to the context in which they typically do their research and theorizing—the classroom within an academic semester or, more often, within a few sessions of writing” (Boice 1985, 473). His finding, that regular scheduled writing generates ideas and that the ideas arrive between sessions rather than during them (477–78), became the spine of a subsequent profusion of productivity books. His method was contingency management by fines: his subjects wrote checks, fifteen dollars each in 1985 (closer to $50 today) to an organization they despised, the Ku Klux Klan among the options, and the checks went out if the writing didn’t (476). Because there is no measure of creativity, he took his subjects’ own lists of the creative ideas they’d had (474) and gave “corrective feedback” on what he deemed the inappropriate ones at a weekly meeting (475).

Robert Zoellner, the behaviorist whose work Gallagher engages, did something different with the record. His “talk-write” of 1969 was a collaborative pedagogy built on the scribal act rather than the finished text, a social process pedagogy before the field had the phrase (Gallagher 2016, 245 and following). Zoellner held that the creative individual is a pattern of behaviors “of such subtlety and complexity as to stand forever beyond gross and tabulative empiricism,” and he opposed learning objectives written ahead of the teaching, because operant work has to wait on what the student freely does (256). Boice tabulated what his writers reported and corrected the report. Zoellner watched what his writers did and declined to tabulate the writer. Both are behaviorisms; what separates them is what each does with the record.

The field kept neither. James Berlin filed behaviorism under “objective rhetoric,” beside so-called current-traditional pedagogy, and consigned both to the dark ages (Gallagher 2016, 243); after the social turn, Gallagher says, the b-word survives as “an absent presence,” an epithet (251).¹

Copia filed as history

Composition kept the invention procedures it could justify with a philosophy of mind and sized them to the course. Ann Berthoff drew the line in 1971: heuristics like Synectics and lateral thinking, she wrote, would have English teachers “playing on our home ice,” since they sat comfortably with poetics and with Burke’s grammar and rhetoric of motives (Berthoff 1971, 238); problem-solving as the educational psychologists conceived it was “philosophically shallow” (239).

The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing, the field’s canonical map, describes Erasmus’s Copia as a schoolbook that taught Renaissance students to express a single idea in hundreds of ways and to amplify an argument through figures, examples and comparison. It’s filed in the rhetorical tradition, under histories and theories. The commonplace book’s lineage rests there beside it, Castiglione on sprezzatura and the letter-writing manual of Erasmus, every entry under the rhetorical tradition or the history of rhetoric and education: Ramus, too, is filed as history by a field busy repeating his move.

In the nine indexed journals the commonplace book turns up three times, two of them the same 1980 CCC article. Copia is a way of producing abundance or surplus—it orients away from scarcity—and the commonplace book is a way of surviving it: the Renaissance already had too much to read, and filing what you’d read was how you made it available to write with again. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy assembles that overload at the scale of a life. Last time I called the box closer to a memory palace, and memoria’s locations live now more severally than ever: filed as history in the Bedford, practiced as software in vaults like mine, copyable and scriptable proliferative text.

Composition owns a five-hundred-year-old system for doing what Ahrens sells with text, has it properly catalogued, and reads it as history. The one piece of that tradition the field did keep, it kept by giving it a theory of mind. Freewriting is copia without the commonplace book: it keeps the production of abundance and drops the storage, a flow with no stock behind it, a supplement to whatever is at hand, with the directive being to keep one’s hands literally—pardon the seemingly misplaced and misused modifier—moving. Elbow’s freewriting exercises, he says, “are sometimes called ‘automatic writing,’ ‘babbling,’ or ‘jabbering’ exercises” (Elbow 1973, 3), and automatic writing has been claimed from every side: as inspiration without the interference of conscious thought in Emerson’s journals, as a surrealist practice once proposed for composition students to imitate, and, by the Oulipo, refused in favor of production under constraint (Berlin 1984, 45; Faigley 1992; Ramsay 2011). Italo Calvino, lecturing on cybernetics in 1967, wondered whether the Surrealists’ discovery in automatic associations of a logic opposed to intellect constituted “the triumph of the irrational” or “the refusal to believe that the irrational exists” (Calvino 1986, 20). The same unstopped writing reads as an interior released or as an empty mechanism, depending on the theory of mind one presupposes. Composition kept freewriting on the first reading as voice and self.

The third column’s cost

I’ve argued, over a series of four posts, for a way of thinking about writers that strips out assumptions about interiority, so that a claim about the value of a writer’s labor doesn’t need to rest on those assumptions. The rule on which I ended: no stage of writing’s circulation contracts on the report of an interior. For that proposal, I expect to face the charge typically rendered by humanists against behaviorism, that it reduces the subject—but I think once more the charge lands on an instrument rather than a doctrine.

Look at what the surviving procedures ask for. Salvatori’s third column asks the student to assess what the reading produced, and her design is generous about what happens to that assessment: her approach, she says, helps teachers steer away from interventions that dwell on mistakes and deficiencies (449). Salvatori says what she’s after in so many words: she is partial to strategies “that can contribute to making what is imperceptible—thinking—at least dimly perceptible” (449). I want that too; it’s why I practice and teach her work. In a seminar or course with small enrollment, it’s easy to not grade such assignments and let motivation and social pressure drive completion. In larger courses I grade the work for completion, counting the output and avoiding reading the report. Boice’s weekly meeting, where the writer lists the creative ideas he had and gets corrective feedback on the inappropriate ones, is another matter: Boice read the report and corrected it himself. The collision doesn’t come from Salvatori’s design; it comes from the course. A column written in a semester is written for a course, and the course has a genre, norms and a grade waiting for whatever reaches the page, so what the column makes perceptible gets entered into the ledger as a product. Pedagogies that assess reflection reduce the subject. The subject I’ve been describing declines to enter the interior into the ledger at all.

The field’s procedures know the reduction performed by monitoring. Elbow’s founding rule for freewriting is that it “must never be evaluated in any way” (Elbow 1973, 4); that rule, and not the expressivism Berlin filed him under, is the Elbow I learned from. The field’s best-known invention procedure is defined by the absence of a grade, and the experimental literature the field’s indexed journals don’t cite found that evaluation suppresses generation (Diehl and Stroebe 1987, 502–4). The course took the notebook, kept it, sized it to fifteen weeks, and put the grade in the third column. So the line doesn’t run between behaviorists and humanists: Boice and the graded third column read the report, and Zoellner and Elbow’s rule keep the record.

The metered interior

Chris Gallagher, in response to the demands of the outcomes regime, proposes a critical vocabulary for what writers do, goals rather than outcomes, students expanding their behavioral repertoires. He writes that we “cannot effectively answer the reductiveness of classical behaviorism with the reductiveness of classical humanism that purports to operate on a higher plane than that of mere behaviors” (257). I feel like that merits a sticky note near my screen. But his learning goals still include developing strategies “through practice and reflection” (238), and his students still come to know what works for them through reflection (258). Reflection as a learning goal is reflection that gets assessed. I think he’d say the humanist idiom protects it, but the column doesn’t read idiom.

Invention isn’t unmeterable by nature. The psychologists metered it by count, the behaviorists by time, and the productivity market meters it every day, in words and notes and streaks. It’s unmetered by the field, because the field refused the units that would have metered it—the idea, the session, the slip—and the fear of numbers I quoted last time seems to me the affect of that refusal. What the field kept instead was a meter that queries the interior. Its unmeterable invention is the culturalized version, and I’d argue such a meter, no matter who holds it, will be the invasive one.

That argument collides with a matter I left hanging in Certification by Plan. I wrote there the only certification that survives automation is certification of formation. But formation is the formation of an interior. Certifying it asks the institution to read what it’s never been able to read, and a graded reflection is that reading done by assignment. I don’t have a resolution. Composition had a stock and taught a flow, kept the word and dropped the procedure, and let the course put the part of invention it couldn’t see into the column that gets a grade.

Years after taking the M71 on Forbes, I found a long bus ride back to a different apartment after an afternoon of teaching provided the opportunity to scribble down what had happened in the class, what I’d hoped would happen, and what I thought about the differend between. Nobody graded that notebook. Its descendants continue to accumulate in the research vault I pictured in my last post, which has become my archive for (gestures vaguely) all this.

References

Ahrens, Sönke. 2017. How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking - for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers. Smart Notes.

Berlin, James A. 1984. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. SIU Press.

Berthoff, Ann E. 1971. “The Problem of Problem Solving.” College Composition and Communication 22 (3): 237–42.

Berthoff, Ann E. (1984) 2003. “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning.” In Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva, 329–43. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. First published in College English 46 (8) (1984): 743–55.

Boice, Robert. 1985. “The Neglected Third Factor in Writing: Productivity.” College Composition and Communication 36 (4): 472–80.

Calvino, Italo. 1986. “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” In The Uses of Literature: Essays, 1–26. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Diehl, Michael, and Wolfgang Stroebe. 1987. “Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: Toward the Solution of a Riddle.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (3): 497–509.

Elbow, Peter. 1973. Writing Without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press. Page references are to the 1998 edition.

Erasmus, Desiderius. 1963. On Copia of Words and Ideas. Edited by Donald B. King and H. David Rix. Madison, WI: Marquette University Press.

Faigley, Lester. 1992. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Gallagher, Chris W. 2016. “What Writers Do: Behaviors, Behaviorism, and Writing Studies.” College Composition and Communication 68 (2): 238–65.

Hatch, Gary Layne. 1992. “Reviving the Rodential Model for Composition: Robert Zoellner’s Alternative to Flower and Hayes.” Rhetoric Review 10 (2): 244–49.

Ramsay, Stephen. 2011. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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