#rhetoric | ENG 5020: Writing Theory & Practice

Peter Elbow and Donald M. Murray love writing. Much like I love writing, and most of you love writing (don’t say I don’t know my audience). It takes someone who loves writing to understand how to teach it this well. You have to have an itching desire to spread what brings you joy.

Promoting low stakes writing in classrooms in order to supplement high stakes writing is an excellent way to teach the writing process and allow students to build the confidence for high stakes assignments. My concern is that everyone who has been involved with the writing and revision of this theory has probably loved writing, or at the very least pedagogy.

I would like to look at this theory from the perspective of someone who hates writing; I want to see this idea from the perspective of a students who hates school.

When Elbow asserts that the ability to convey understanding is of equal importance to the understanding itself, I may argue that I can convey my knowledge, just not in writing. Or, that according to Vershawn Ashanti Young, I do not need practice in conveying my ideas how the system has deemed they are supposed to be written out.

Then I stop in my tracks, and realize I have lost sight of my perspective, because no student that truly hates writing references Young to explain why.

Peter Elbow broaches the concept that speaking feels lower stakes than writing. Students do it constantly, at recess, at lunch, in class- it’s a challenge for them not to talk. Speaking feels lower stakes because we are not openly evaluated when speaking. In fact, you have to watch the other person closely if you want to pick up on how they’re truly reacting to what you’ve said.

Writing is permanent, and expressionless. Not in the sense that nothing is expressed, but that there are not gestures, or facial features, or intonation to express tone and emotion. All of that has to come through in rhetorical technique and grammatical choices.

But, just because nobody can use a red pen to show you where you’re “wrong” in your speech, or how you could change it to improve your communication, does not mean that you are not using rhetorical techniques to be perceived a certain way. That also means that everyone uses rhetorical analysis on a daily basis in order to perceive one another. Yes, I know, terrifying. Rhetoric is simply unspoken in the physical world, as opposed to the written world.

With a recorded thought you can go back and re-analyze, re-read, and the thought stays the same. There is no shifting language, the idea cannot be forgotten, misconstrued or warped by the passage of time. The spoken word is subject to the human memory, which is heavily impacted by perspective and time. Anyone can lie about anything, there’s no proof to go back to.

All writing is high-stakes is you consider it’s permanence, and that is why many struggle to force themselves to do it. It feels unnatural in comparison to talking to a friend. I think to expand on this idea I would ask about where the boundaries of low stakes writing are. Is texting low stakes writing? If so, I think incorporating written communication between friends into the classroom could do a great job of encouraging students to enjoy low stakes writing.

This also leads us to the question of what “good” writing is, and if “academically correct” and “good” being synonymous has some classist and racist undertones. Peter Elbow draws attention to the line between the importance of understanding and the importance of being able to convey your understanding, but I would argue that most can convey their understanding. They simply may not be able to record their understanding in a way you deem intelligent or respectable.

But I’ll save that for Vershawn Ashanti Young.

Janice M. Lauer beautifully organizes an explanation to something as complex as rhetoric. Taking a page from her book (quite literally), I’d like to begin by highlighting one of the key components of rhetoric: the concept that it is multimodal.

Rhetoric is built into the very fundamentals of Human nature. In every conversation we hold with one another, every room we walk into, and even in every passing greeting, rhetoric hides behind the placement of our words, our hair, our clothes, our gestures. Our behaviors are all very rationalized and thought out, and they all say something about who we are and who we want to be perceived as- and where those two selves converge.

Lauer address this concept herself on page 6 when she talks about “the end of the 1980s, [when] Louise Wetherbee Phelps characterized this newly emerging discipline of rhetoric and composition as a “human science”. ” In my eyes rhetoric is more akin to a discipline of psychology than a disciple of writing, but as previously discussed, it is multimodal and interdisciplinary.

Rhetoric encapsulates the question ‘why’. Why did you choose that word, and why that format, why did you choose to write this piece– a rhetorical analysis feeds the starving child in our heads, the one who always asked why and was asked to stop (because it can be quite annoying).

But what if my child never stopped asking , and now when someone passes me in the hall and doesn’t smile, she needs a why. Rhetoric is all about looking very closely at things, picking them apart for their reasoning, but when you spend too much time doing that all you’re left with is a lot of anxiety.

When you become so aware that everything is a choice that says something about you, everything feels very paralyzing. I guess the same is true about writing, that every word I’m writing right now could be analyzed, and you could try to figure out why I said everything the way I said it (please don’t do that), but if I was really so nervous about that I wouldn’t show you my writing.

That’s the thing about writing, it’s easily changed. I can go back in and edit a document, or cross out a sentence, but it’s much harder to change things in the real world. Perhaps it’s the lack of control of real time that leaves me so frightened.