Writing
1. “Writing,” “language,” and “students” are connected in the shape of a triangle. If we look at the words through the lens “language-writing-students,” it points to Threshold Concept 3.1, “Writing is linked to identity,” in which Kevin Roozen writes, “The act of writing, then, is not so much about using a particular set of skills as it is about becoming a particular kind of person” (qtd. in Adler-Kassner and Wardle 51). Writing enables the development of the self, and it also allows students to perform different identities within different communities and situations. If we adjust the view, through the lens “writing-students(’)-language,” another trend comes into focus: students and their individual voices. Since CCC’s Students’ Right to Their Own Language statement, the field has advocated for a more multilingual and individualized attention to voice. However, in Joseph Harris’s A Teaching Subject, he notes the pedagogical tension that “stem[s] from deep and conflicting institutions about how language and the self are related” (56).
2. “Writing” and “genres” are only connected through the terms “FYC” and “classroom.” This appears to situate genre only inside the composition class. The location is important to note, as this distance between the genres in the classroom and their relevance to the outside world reveals another debate in the field. Elizabeth Wardle criticizes in “Mutt Genres” the artificiality of genre assignments: “Simply teaching students institutionalized features of various genres limits and simplifies the varied exigencies to which those genres have responded in their rhetorical situations outside of the FYC classroom” (678). Still, as Fulkerson describes in “Composition at the Turn of the 21st Century,” teaching genres remains one of the three most prevalent approaches to FYC.
3. It is interesting that the word “grammar” does not appear at all in our word web. However, “writing” does connect to “current” in the form of current-traditional (three out of the five times it was used in the document), signifying the shift from focus on form to focus on meaning and effective communication. This absence of grammar also brings attention to the general misconception outside the field that teaching writing denotes teaching grammar. Student writers in Nancy Sommers’s study understood revision—better writing—to be mostly a matter of word choice and word rearrangement. Similarly, the pressures other disciplines put on FYC to reform students’ grammar illustrate the skewed expectations of those outside the field who see FYC as a service course. This misconception is a result of the field’s continual struggle to define itself and its goals in FYC to other stakeholders.
4. Although “composition” and “studies” is the strongest link, “writing” and “studies” comes in at a close second. This reveals the recent shift toward conceptualizing composition and rhetoric under writing studies. Karen Kopelson identifies in “Sp(l)itting Images” a need to broaden the field’s research outside the limiting framework of the pedagogical imperative. Other scholars have advocated for FYC to embrace writing—and writing about writing—as their content (Hairston; Downs and Wardle; Adler-Kassner and Wardle).