At the beginning of the semester, my professor introduced Threshold Concepts from Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies. The point of this project was for us to see there are multiple sides to writing- there is always something to think about and how to think about it- encouraging us to reflect and dig deeper.
I wanted to share this project with everyone now that the semester has come to an end, this is going to be a “tag game” of sorts where we as writers can reflect on each concept or just one, what does it mean to you as a writer? Has this impacted your writing journey? Do you have any experiences?
This can be a short response or it can be long- it’s up you you, dear traveler. Once you make your response, tag 10 writers you know!
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1. Writing is a social and rhetorical activity
2. Writing speaks to situations through recognizable forms
3. Writing enacts and creates identities and ideologies
4. All writers have more to learn
5. Writing is (also always) a cognitive activity
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Tagging: @achy-boo @silpuppete @honey-milk-depresso @cupids-chamber @adrianasunderworld @miloticbish and anyone else who wants to participate!
First, what even are they and why do they matter? The book Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, is where I first really learned about this jazz. You should read it too if you want more info after this post.
Now let's talk about them! There are five of 'em and they’re pretty neat. To begin, we’ve got Transformative! This concept is about how writing changes the way you think and view the world. Which is true. We read to learn and write to share, communicating all sorts of rad stuff. We write for people to read, meaning we create our audiences as well as our text. You can’t have readers if you don’t share! SHARE! (concept 1.2 for those interested) Your voice is important and interesting! Your words change the world! Isn’t that cool!?
Next is Irreversible. Nothing you say or write publically can be unsaid. Which means you need to think about what impact your words will have. Some of us are better at this than others. (personally, i recommend being kind and accepting of people and writing for everyone to enjoy. I'm only intolerant of intolerance) What we write is a representation of ourselves and the world we live in, from thoughts to emotions and events(concept 2.1, friendos). You gotta make sure you’ re sharing what you want to share and how you want it to come across.
Integrative is number 3, and it’s all about how writing is a way to understand and learn. Everything you write will be informed by your prior experience(3.3) and it’s linked to your identity. Every writer is different because we’ve all lived different lives. Writing is deeply personal and dependant on the individual writer’s experiences.
Concept 4 is that writing is Bounded. This kinda ties into the last one. There is always more to learn(4.0). Authors are limited in their knowledge and ability and are often told to write what they know for this reason. To get better, they practice, revise, edit, and are constantly learning. This also means that you can increase what you know through reading/speaking/doing and the like, therefore giving you more to write about! Also, good encouragement to get out there and try new things! Travel, try cooking something new, study a new topic, read a new book series, work on what you’ve been writing, etc.
The last one is... Troublesome. No, really!!! People resist learning if the ideas shared with them are not compatible with their own. Writing is a social and cognitive act(5.0), so it makes sense that in a social situation with many people, not all will agree with each other fully. It’s unfortunate, especially when it comes to big topics, like global warming or misogyny or homophobia. Instead of trying to understand, people trap themselves in incorrectness by thinking about what they think about, but that is not real cognition, real learning (5.2). That’s a person convincing themselves that they are correct, even when they’re not by having mental conversations with themselves.
Anyway, these are the writing threshold concepts! I hope you learned something. I know I did! If there is anything you don’t understand or think is incorrect, let me know! Let’s learn together! Let’s hope tumblr doesn’t completely end, right? haha. oh well.
Writing? In my life? It's more likely than you think.
As writers we’d like to think that our craft is esoteric, something that not a whole lot of the world experiences. Or maybe that’s hipsters. Either way, in a world accelerating toward a more technological future, certain things tend to fall by the way side.
But that’s only what they want you to think.
Who wants you to think that? No clue, but it’s a good hook. It’s got the conspiracy edge I’m looking for.
Writing has its meaning that’s ever evolving, ever changing, and even ever more personalized. I think that’s evident when looking through the internet seeing the rapid change from one medium of writing to the next. Writing (and reading, by extension) aren’t just what the academy has tried to enlighten me with.
People ask, all the time: how does this weird ass math problem going to apply to my everyday life? When am I just gonna suddenly have 25 watermelons and why does Brenda want half of them?
But, I don’t often here that applied to English courses and maybe because people have this idea that they’re going to be writing these types of papers all of their lives. In reality, they won’t and it’s created such a disconnect within myself personally between academic writing and personal writing. Which, makes sense, but I think it honestly perpetuates this idea that my passions can only be conveyed through personal writing, which won’t ever be seen by anyone but myself and a random assortment of my friends and peers. It’s a subconscious idea that, while I may not like it and have apathy toward it, it’s somehow more important than my personal writing, which conveys my sense of self and my identity far more.
But, this intro is getting severely long. The main concept I’m trying to drive here is attempting to reconcile the ways in which I write academically versus how I write personally through this weird, but cool idea: Threshold Concepts.
Writing 2: Electric Boogaloo and the Threshold Concepts
First, you gotta understand what a threshold concept is, then understand what it means in writing. As I see it, a threshold concept provides a rough layout of how individuals can perceive a certain field of thinking or doing. It’s like living in your own little house of writing and thinking, “I could use a window right there,” and then implementing that idea. Now, with that window, you have a new perspective of the landscape you previously didn’t have. But! You also have a new way of looking in. Threshold concepts, to me, act in such a way that they change the way we view certain aspects of our world, which also changes the way we look at other concepts.
On the other hand, it’s also irreversible. You can always put the wall back, but threshold concepts don’t really work in that way. It’s like seeing the color blue. Suddenly, there’s a new way to look at things, but you can’t quite remove that new way. It’ll be there, always. In this way, like most things concerning change, it’s resisted and looked at in a combative light, as if it were aggressively taking something away. It’s only taking ignorance away, which can be overwhelming and hard to get used to. But, on the bright side, it’s not as if it changes everything and uproots an entire idea. It’s like that window, it only provides another way of looking at something and it even changes how we perceive some things, but that doesn’t always affect and change everything around us.
Just like changing a traditionally white character and making them PoC. It’s a new perspective, but ultimately it’s not really harmful and in fact helps us see the world in a newer light. But people hate it because ‘muh white privilege!’
Ultimately it’s about me. It always has been. Me! Me! Me!
While this serves as a guide in how we see writing and its effects on the world, this whole project is ultimately a journal about myself and me and my writing. Though, I do like that added bonus. If anything, I’d want it to help people see writing as more than just an academic thing or something that’s niche. We all write and writing affects us in numerous ways. In a sense, we all employ these threshold concepts and it’s good to metacognate. I coined that term. It’s mine and it’s my verb form of metacognition—but you can use it whoever’s reading this thing. It makes use not only better writers, but better people ‘cause introspection is hard and it’s hard to take responsibility for some of the things you do. I mean, that’s blatantly obvious in our current culture, isn’t it? I’m getting on a tangent, but before I get back on topic: it’s really easy to point fingers at people, but it’s really hard to point fingers at one’s self, which is why identifying and combating one’s own privilege and realizing that intersectionality exists is a really fucking hard thing to do and even I have trouble with it as a cisgendered male.
Anyways, back to those threshold concepts that apply to my own writing:
2.2 Genres are Enacted by Writers and Readers - Like all popular culture, genre is informed by what people want and are open to the most at any given time. But it’s also a habitual experience that sets itself firmly in areas of our world. Genres are more than just ‘sci-fi’ or ‘fantasy’ or any number of things you see at Barns and Nobles. Genres are modes where we produce our writing from the academic essay to fan-fiction and the subgenres therein. Through society and our culture, these genres are continuously built upon even though they sometimes stagnant, and no genres pop up throughout time.
2.5 Writing is Performative - Performing in one’s writing depends on genre and audience. It draws back to the fact that 1.0 Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity because we analyze who we’re writing to and thus we change our style to reflect that. We write to get good grades, to blow people’s minds, to satisfy our own kinks. Writing is an act in which we perform a self that we can’t in our every day lives, or that we need to in our jobs or school work.
3.1 Writing is Linked to Identity - That leads wonderfully into identity and writing. It builds off of the previous concept through the idea that the communities we engage with develop and evolve our identities within our own writing. We find our identities in the genres we produce and sometimes we detach ourselves almost outright from other genres. Even that is molding and perceiving an identity within writing because it tells us what modes of writing is more important to us and which genres and mediums we comfortably display our identities in.
4.0 All Writers Have More to Learn - Honestly, this one’s self explanatory, but we always think that writing is just an ability that people have or don’t, or that people can learn and be done with. But, writing lends itself to various mediums, genres, modes, and so on. Writing can’t just be perceived as only a tree stump that you can check off a list. Rather, writing is a number of branches stemming from one central core: rhetoric. And we constantly learn and adapt our writing to fit various ideas and to connect to various audiences. If writing were to stagnate, then we’d fail to convey even the simplest ideas in our ever evolving future. Thus, writing can only evolve and people can evolve with it.
But what about muh writing?
These four threshold concepts are ones that I see all across my own writing and ones that I identify with the most. But, we’ll tackle it in the two genres I find myself writing in the most and they’re pretty broad:
First and foremost, I love to write and that love is conveyed mostly through my personal writing. It’s found in my poetry, in the fan-fiction I write, in the roleplays I write with my friends. It’s a passion for creativity and the need to find who I am. Poetry itself acts as a genre that digs its roots hard in the self and one’s own identity. I’m no exception to that.
My poetry has evolved through the times and has gotten better, sometimes worse, sometimes it just is. Overall, I’ve found a lot of who I am in my own poetry and I display that in a performative manner that allows me to show that to other people. It also allows me to be proud in myself and my work.
More over, personal writing as a whole, has allowed me to write about identities that I cannot find in the media. In my previous project, I talked about Rom-Coms and analyzed the terministic screen of the cishet representation in Rom-Coms. It’s this exact issue that I tackle in my writing because writing allows me to connect with an identity and a community that lets me further evolve that identity.
Furthermore, it allows me to learn about more than just writing; it branches into ideas of representation, sexism in media, and the outlet writing provides to marginalized people who may not be able to find themselves out in the world. It conveys a part of myself that I am unable to find in other genres because the standards some genres, like academia, are built upon and protected by people who don’t have my best interests in mind. They don’t have my experiences to show them more than just what they’re willing to understand.
Writing in an academic standard and environment has gotten better since I was in high school, but it still isn’t all the way there for me. I find comfort in the unchanging particularly because it’s just what I’ve been taught. But, that comfort doesn’t equate to satisfaction and I typically don’t feel satisfied when writing in an academic setting.
It’s why I have such difficulty in an academic setting despite getting good grades in my English courses. My instinct when writing, which has been driven into me by years of my own personal writing, is the need to feel different and separate from others. It’s not about being a unique, special person, but finding a place I can fill in a community that no one else can or maybe even wants to. Finding my personal identity allows me to connect with a community in a more personal way rather than in uniformity. In academia, my writing cannot separate itself from the masses because standardized English sets everyone up in the same box and doesn’t give them the opportunity to leave the boundaries unless the professor or teacher takes action against it. Or they allow students to take that action themselves.
Not all academic writing is like that; these three projects are testament to that fact. But, unfortunately, a lot of my experiences with academic writing have lead me to believe that a lot of it is like this. And it kind sucks a big fat load because I firmly believe that it’s driven a lot of excellent writers away from learning how to be excellent writers. Because they cannot find an identity within this community that differs from their peers and like me they go through these prompts and essays in a mechanical, apathetic way because it’s the only way they can get a good grade on it. It’s like the rote memorization of writing.
Why is it important? To me, at least, it’s important to understand this because I feel, as students and future teachers and professors, we should attempt to take action against it. Change happens slowly, but it can happen and it should happen. I want academic writing to hit that some sweet spot that my personal writing does for me. But, as of right now, academic writing does not engage my will to learn because I cannot take these skills further than my graduation. I don’t have an identity in academic writing and I’d be hard pressed to believe that anyone does because they don’t really understand any core concepts of writing or rhetoric. All they’re doing is performing the part of a good student, doing the work to check off a list for a good grade, and moving on to whatever they’re passionate about without realizing the importance of writing in their lives and building upon that invaluable skill.
That’s what’s important to me and what’s built the foundation of my writing and how I perceive all kinds of writing, but primarily academic and personal.
Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED talk y’all.
Citation Stuff Things
Adler-Kassner, Linda, and Elizabeth A. Wardle. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. Utah State University Press, 2016.
Also stuff I learned in class so Dr. Rory Lee is in this citation because yes.
Whether you share my viewpoint that these threshold concepts are really important in your writing process or not, it is important to understand your own writing process and your own relationship with writing. Being able to identify what threshold concepts play a part in your life can help you gain a better understanding of yourself and your own mind, the way you learn, and gain a different perspective of the world around you. Understanding your own writing process and how you both read and write texts will give you so much insight into both yourself and the world.
My concepts, for instance, have helped me establish a stronger sense of who I am, have helped me accept that failure can be a positive thing, and have helped me understand that the texts you interact with will shape your view of the world and will impact your own writing. That being said, what threshold concepts do you think play a part in your writing process? In what ways do you define your relationship with writing? What does your writing process look like?
Each 4 of the concepts I have chosen play different, but equally significant, parts in my relationship with writing. Everyone has their own individualized writing process but I felt that these 4 concepts in particular played important roles in mine.
I chose Concept 2.1 because I feel that it expresses how writing is a foundation for knowledge and plays a huge part in how we not only see the world around us but how we see ourselves. So, in other words, writing serves as the foundation for everything we know about the world.
I chose Concept 2.6 because the texts we interact with influence the texts we then produce. Everything we will ever write is in response or in reference to another text (written or non-written). So, the texts we interact with will have an influence on the texts that we then produce both in content and how we chose to write.
I chose Concept 3.1 because I feel like you can discover so much about who you are and gain a stronger sense of self through writing which then impacts what and how you write. I personally have learned so much about myself through writing and have uncovered parts of my identity through my own writing process which is why I feel like this concept is so important.
I chose Concept 4.2 because failure is such an imperative part of the writing process that is so frequently overlooked and ignored. In my own life, learning from my failures and developing the mindset that failure is a part of the writing process have both been huge parts of how I have grown into the writer I am today.
All 4 of these concepts have greatly impacted me in both my own writing process and my relationship with writing. While not everyone may feel the same connection to these 4 threshold concepts that I do, it is important to recognize what threshold concepts play a part in your own writing process.
Everyone’s writing process is different and everyone will have a different experience when it comes to their relationship with writing. While reading this book, there were 4 threshold concepts that stuck out to me in terms of my own writing process:
Concept 2.1: Writing Represents the World, Events, Ideas, and Feelings. This concept discusses how writing about what we know, think, and feel has the ability to shape what is considered common knowledge and that most of what we know about the world around us comes from how things are represented in the texts we interact with. In terms of the criteria for a threshold concept, this particular concept is especially transformative and troublesome because it has the ability to change the way people see the world and may typically be resisted because of the way it disagrees with the opinions a person previously held.
Concept 2.6: Texts Get Their Meaning From Other Texts. This section focuses on how texts rely on other texts (both written and non-written) to create meaning and how texts often coincide with one another and cannot stand alone. The criteria that this concept heavily relies on is that it is bounded and integrative because while this concept discusses how texts must rely on other texts to create meaning, not all texts are interlinked, and this concept can be utilized to understand other concepts.
Concept 3.1: Writing is Linked to Identity. This concept explains how writing can act as a way for us to uncover parts of ourselves and our multiple identities. This concept also discusses how we use writing to display our identities and identify what communities we are apart of and how we align with the beliefs and values of these said communities. This concept, in terms of criteria, is irreversible because permanent change can be enacted if people can discover certain things about themselves and their own identities through writing.
Concept 4.2: Failure Can Be an Important Part of Writing Development. This concept talks about the fact that failure is an imperative part of the writing process and that successful writers are those who can learn from their mistakes. Regarding the threshold concepts criteria, this concept in particular is especially troublesome because it is, at first, very difficult to accept failure as it is typically seen as a negative thing but once you realize that by accepting and learning from failure, you can succeed in writing, this can completely transform your life and your writing process.
The term threshold concepts come from the book “Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies,” edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle. This book establishes a core foundation of what is known about the field of writing and how one participates in writing through threshold concepts, written by a variety of experts in the field. There are 5 items that make up the criteria for a threshold concept. Threshold concepts are:
Transformative (can change the way someone thinks and sees things)
Irreversible (can produce permanent change)
Integrative (can utilize this concept to understand other concepts)
Bounded (this concept is not connected to everything)
Troublesome.(this concept is typically resisted because of its transformative ability and it is at odds with what is previously believed or thought)
While this book identifies what we do know about the act of writing, it is important to note that there is always more to learn.
A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, with the transition to understanding proving troublesome. Such a transformed view or landscape may represent how people ‘think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally). It might, of course, be argued, in a critical sense, that such transformed understanding leads to a privileged or dominant view and therefore a contestable way of understanding something. This would give rise to discussion of how threshold concepts come to be identified and prioritised in the first instance.
Jan Meyer and Ray Land, “Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge: Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising within the Disciplines”, 2003
