What's in a Name?: Naming What We Do in the Writing Classroom

For this project, we analyzed our class’s book chapter proposals in an effort to determine the current state of Composition and Rhetoric (or is it Composition Studies? Writing Studies, perhaps?). In order to discover our class’s view of the current state of affairs, we created and analyzed several visuals in an effort to see the frequency in terms and connections between those terms. Our analysis demonstrates that we connect with the field’s past in that we seem to struggle with the field’s name, and yet we look to the future in our pushing forth for social concerns in the study of writing and the writing classroom. To make the most of this learning experience, start from the very bottom (the last page) and work your way back to the start.

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Works Cited

Crowley, Sharon. “Composition Is Not Rhetoric.” Enculturation 5.1 (2003). Enculturation. Web. 3 Aug. 2016.

Detweiler, Eric. “/” “And” “-”?: An Empirical Consideration of the Relationship Between “Rhetoric” and “Composition.” Enculturation (2015). Enculturation. Web. 3 Aug. 2016.

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966. 2nd ed. Logan: Utah State UP, 2012. Print.

Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” CCC 59.4 (2008): 750-780. PDF.

Ratcliffe, Krista. “The Current State of Composition Scholar/Teachers: Is Rhetoric Gone or Just Hiding Out?” Enculturation 5.1 (Fall 2003). Enculturation. Web. 3 Aug. 2016.

Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. “Collocates Graph.” Voyant Tools. Voyant Tools, 2016. Web. 3 Aug. 2016 —. “Trends Graph.” Voyant-Tools, 18 Jul. 2016, http://voyant-tools.org/. —. Voyant-Tools, 18 Jul. 2016, http://voyant-tools.org/.

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Works Consulted:

Breuch, Lee-Ann M. Kastman. “Post-Process ‘Pedagogy’: A Philosophical Enterprise.” JAC 22.1 (2002): 119-50. 

Kitzhaber, Albert. “4C, Freshman English, and the Future.” CCC 14 (1963): 129-38. PDF.

Mueller, Derek. “Views from a Distance. A Nephological Model of the CCCC Chairs’ Addresses, 1971-2011.” Kairos 16.2 (2012). Kairos. Web. 3 Aug. 2016.

[theperilsofteaching]

Finishing a 3 credit graduate course in 6 days.

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PhDon’t quite understand, but I’ll pretend I do

[lolmythesis]

I talked to different people, and they said different things.

Rhetoric and Composition, University of Rhode Island.

[thedomenicanrepublic]

Majoring in English: aka majoring in learning how to bullsh*t with finesse 

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So where do we go from here?

Composition (studies)/Writing Studies, or whatever the field may be best called at the time, finds itself much like a Foucault’s pendulum swinging back and forth but making a circle over time. While the clichéd phrase “the more things change, the more they stay the same” can be applied to the field, the field can be seen as being fractured. And continuously fractured. Like that pendulum, movements are not simply axiomatic but multi-faceted. 

The swinging movements and reactions do not go in a linear fashion where development is clean. Instead, the movements are a reaction to the past and build upon the past in order to make the future – eventually all the past can be seen in all the future, for an entire circle can be made when momentum continues and movements are absorbed/changed.

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If a glimpse can be taken as to where the field is, the glimpse is only that limited amount of time and insight. Such a glimpse shows hints at the past and future – not just the immediate past and future but also a long term past and future. Maybe a better metaphor can be this sense of fracture.

 Among the ten terms, none are the same: We were fractured. Not even the meanings are the same with slight differences. Looking at the fact that all the selections were/are different, an observer can see this coherent fracturing among the ten people. 

The group still overlaps. This overlapping causes strength while being diverse. Like a fractured bone which has been splintered, healing is not quick; however, the healed bone can become stronger. Splinters expand the mass of the original bone and are calcified again to form a bigger, stronger bone. This is the skeleton of the field.

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The Process Movement seems initially to not be of the original bone; it seems to not be a revisiting of the once circled Foucault Pendulum. “Process” however became a noun instead of a verb. The field went from Process to Post-Process and has returned to Rhetoric. 

These ten terms are a microcosm that represent the entire field, but they like the entire field are divided yet united. As highlighted earlier, the words still represent a social turn in the field. Such a social turn still aligns with process and how/why something is interpreted the way it is from the reader. Even “genre” still appeals to the expectations – expectations set by others. “Process” may have taken a route to the internal, but the field seems currently to reject a focus on the internal.

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To understand how we are united and stronger due to division, we must first understand the nature of the field. Maybe this too can be understood within a microcosm. 

While one person in our subgroup asserts “[o]ur findings are important because they reflect that we are interested in the future of comp/rhet scholarship, that we have important things to say, and that we are excited about the future. Every term, every proposal, every bit of this work shows a passion for working with writers to make a better future for them, and I think that’s important, significant, and pretty awesome” which directly underscores passion for posterity, another shows reservation and desire to progress with “In order to fully understand in what direction we should be heading, it is important to understand where we stand. There can be no forward movement if we do not understand which way is forward.” 

Another swing seems to be between the two who write (1) “The biggest takeaway that I see from our list of terms is that we haven’t left anything out from the field. Like Kopelson calls for, we’ve broadened the field. However, we’ve left rhetoric out of it; it appears in some of the texts, but it’s not as prominent” and the other who writes (2) “we […] are becoming more fractured - splinters of fractures even which often intersect. Extending this metaphor, the fractures and splinters heal often and leave big messes, but the healed fracture and splintering is not necessarily weaker.” Individual voices shine through while overall concerns about betterment and hope for the future may be in a supporting, background role. 

The take-away is that we are divided still united. We have hope to help not only our students but our peers, but we also have a desire to move if not push into the future in order to help those students of the future. Such help may, however, lead directly to looking at the distant or not-so distant past.

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Take-aways: 

(1) The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

(2) It may be the end of the world as we know it, but that is just fine (for we too may change). 

(3) If we want to understand the future best, we need to understand (and appreciate) the past.

Maybe these are the only take-away type lessons we could have – ones that agree with the latest readings or we would reject ones that did not align (at least) closely with our newly-preconceived notions.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is like a big Foucault’s pendulum where the past influences the future but soon the past and the future become blurred.

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Implications for Voyant

Voyant, as a tool for corpus analysis, can be incredibly useful; however its server is easily overloaded. The open-source nature makes for easy-access, but we ran into several instances of crashed browsers, error-messages, and lost-data in the processing. In terms of data-analysis, Voyant struggles with subtleties in terminology and relies on case-sensitivity.

 For example, it articulated “Identities” and “identities” as separate terms. The researcher would need to review the corpus in advance and articulate data terms for capital letters, proper nouns, hyphenated names (Voyant does not identify hyphenated terms), singular versus plural meanings (such as “literacy vs. literacies). 

Terms such as “access” can be tricky, as the word itself has many differing functions and meanings.  Voyant, as it currently functions, cannot articulate the nuances of contextual uses and variance of words. That’s not to say that it necessarily needs to do so, but the researcher needs to be aware that this limitation is in place before conducting their analyses, and it raises the question: Is the amount of time it takes to reformulate the data in these instances worth the trouble?

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Graph to the Future II: This Time, There’s More Collocates.

We made a large collocates graph, and then made individual screen-shot images of each term to better display connections and to highlight the links between terms and to showcase collocates.

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Interesting Collocates for Each Key Term:

“Access” had it’s most direct link to composition on the collocates graph. This is surprising, as we had expected to see a connection to disability—however, while disability is in proximity, it’s not a direct link: “greater, brief, and issues” are instead linked terms in this keyword collocate.

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Multimodal

“Multimodal” reflected ties to “writing,” “understanding”. “classroom” and “texts”: all key terms tied with this term that is prevalent in composition studies. Yet, we see no ties to “composition.” The direct ties to teaching—through “classroom” and “writing” seems to imply the pedagogical undertones of the approach through the collocates view.

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Identities

Examining the keyword “identities” revealed links to a host of unexpected terms: “alcoff,” “focusing,” “disputable,” “dilemma,” and “attention”: all which create a context of mystery around the identity creation. We see no direct collocate links to writing—an interesting reveal, based on so much of our reading that links identity formation to writing.

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Communication

The “communication” key word ties to “modes”, “writing”, “concept”, “available”, and “academy”, situating this keyword links in a relatively pedagogical context. We expect communication to have a tie to writing, but its tie was not exceptionally strong, as depicted by the strength of the line between the two terms, however, it is stronger then the other terms within its linked connections.

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Literacy

“Literacy” is linked to “academia,” “banishing” “Bloom” and “autonomous” (Here, we assume “Bloom” refers to the taxonomies); however, each one of these terms only has one linked collocates. Their significance is not immediately apparent. Out of curiosity, I brought in the term “literacies,” but the terms were not linked. Here. we have an set of interesting findings where literacy is more linked to academia than it is to writing, students, or composition. And since “English” or “reading” are not indexed terms within our corpus, we do not have any apparent links to those terms.

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Response

“Response” had a variety of collocates that were interesting to observe, with the strongest link to students, followed by “ethical” and “rhetorical,” and concluding with “help” and the [19]70s. These findings were extremely on par with the subject matter of response and gives the reader a very brief (but narrowly comprehensive) understanding of the chapter objectives in a visual nutshell.

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Transfer

“Transfer” shows its strongest link to the term” studies,” followed by “genre”, “students” and then with less frequency to the terms “demonstrates”, “cognition”, and “compositionists”, yet we see another “chapter portrait here of what “Transfer” is – applicable for students, demonstrates cognition, studied by compositionists. This was a very interesting example of how collocates can be reasonable representations of what you can find within a source through linked terms.

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Affect:

Looking at the term “affect” we noticed a thin line connecting “audiences,” “consider,” “adding” and “concept.” It’s like a little plea: Consider adding this concept to audiences (your students). Otherwise, the collocates are not especially revealing here.

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Genre

Genre had a high number of instances within the corpus (23) and had relatively strong ties to “studies”, with lesser ties to “theory”, “social”, and “recent.”  This could be telling of genre theory and studies, the aspect of writing as social activity and genre-determined.

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Meta-Cognition

“Meta-Cognition” shows a strong tie to cognition, followed by weaker ties to “concept,” and “approach” and the term “basis:” the viewer here may get the sense that meta-cognition is more of an emerging concept and approach from this visual.

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Implications from Collocates Graphs:

As we have witnessed, some collocates graphs are more telling about the actual content of their texts than others: some leave the viewer puzzling over the enigmatic links between words. In some respects, the collocates work far better when operating with a larger corpus, so that stronger links between words can form. And since we manipulated our data, adding particular keywords to examine in an already limited corpus, we perhaps reflect limited findings. However, some of these, we feel, reflect some of the trends within composition and rhetoric today, and perhaps even moving into the future.

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Graph to the Future: Collocates and Keys.

The Collocates Graph is a valuable tool that can reflect connections in a network graph of “higher frequency terms that appear in proximity” (Voyant-Tools). “Keywords”, or the highest frequency terms, appear in green, and “collocates” (words in proximity within the text) appear in brown. 

Using Voyant tools, the end-user can input additional terms into their graph and then reflect on the findings. On the website, this tool is interactive: a mouse over a term shows the frequency within the corpus; hovering over collocates reflects “frequency in proximity” (as opposed to total frequency); and double-clicking on a term removes the term from the current graph and opens it in a new window with additional collocate links (Voyant-Tools).

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The most frequent terms in our corpus were:

 “writing”(75 instances),  “students” (49 instances), “composition” (40 instances), and “studies” (33 instances). 

We added our chapter key words to the graph to see what connections would emerge in the text: 

“access” (6 instances), “multimodal” (7 instances), “identities” (3 instances), “communication” (8 instances), “literacy” (10 instances), “response” (4 instances), “transfer” (22 instances), “affect” (5 instances), “genre” (23 instances), and “meta-cognition” (12 instances). 

It is important to note that the numbers of instances are composites between the corpus as a whole and the not individual instances within each chapter proposal.

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Our Keys For the Harris Book Chapter Proposals:

Access

Multimodal

Identities

Communication

Literacy

Response

Transfer

Affect

Genre

Meta-Cognition

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Naming Redux.

So even though we represented the field with various names, “composition studies” seems to be what we settled on in our corpus. However, the name issue does not seem to hinder our movement towards broadening the field. 

We seem to be positively moving beyond Kopelson’s conclusions for the state of the field in 2008: “Yet, despite such indications that the calls for broadened conceptions of the field are being heard at last, there is equally ample evidence that we are continuing to preoccupy ourselves with ourselves” (774). Of course, there seems to be a name divide among us, but that divide seems to be between composition studies and writing studies, which seems to be an enacting of Detweiler’s conclusions that “‘writing’ and ‘communication’ thus seem to be greater areas of divergent disciplinary flux than ‘composition’ and ‘rhetoric’ themselves.” 

From our texts, we connect rhetoric with composition, and leave it at that, but we seem to use writing studies and composition studies interchangeably. Even though there is a divide with how we name the field, it does not seem to hinder how we perceive broadening and enacting the field.

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Writing: the Mode of Modes

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While our field still uses variations of Rhetoric and Composition as a naming device, rhetoric was mentioned the least of all in our texts. 

Only three selections in the corpus mentioned rhetoric: “Meta-cognition,” “Communication,” and “Affect.” “Meta-cognition” mentions it the most—three times. The others only refer to rhetoric twice. It is unclear from the Trends Graph whether “rhetoric” is evoked on its own as a freestanding concept or is only mentioned in conjunction with composition as a name for the field. A search of our corpus demonstrates that rhetoric and composition appeared only twice. 

However, there were five uses of rhetoric to describe a field, and so it appears that rhetoric stands alone as a separate field within Composition Studies. Dropping rhetoric from our title, though, does not at all prove Crowley’s fears. We may simply understand that rhetoric is inherently involved in the composing process, which seems to indicate that rhetoric is now a subfield to composition studies or writing studies.