In reading Janice Lauer’s “Rhetoric and Composition”, I find myself thinking about my experience with the act of writing throughout my years in school. It feels odd to be able to put a name to all the work I’ve done before, both as a student and during my experience as a tutor. The margins of my print-out copy of the reading recall my experiences in the classroom: “i always talk about how students consider themselves ‘bad writers’” and “dr. walters is that you” in response to the idea of revision.

In particular, I found myself reflecting on what Lauer calls the current-traditional paradigm, and how for most of my life, writing was taught to be a challenge with subjective parameters. There was an idea of what good writing was, who did it, and where it could be found. Rhetoric was a two-day unit (vocabulary test included), and feedback from teachers focused on punctuation and sentence counts. This experience with writing often extended past me. When I talk about how people learn to write, I tend to refer back to a student of mine who considered herself a “bad writer”. In reality, her issue was a weak grasp on things like comma placement, something that we were able to fix in just a few tutoring sessions. Her voice, however, was something that seemed to come naturally. She was adamant that she wasn’t good at writing, and for the first half of the semester, was hesitant to engage with our class. I think years of being told writing could only be done a certain way taught her to feel shame in her work. To coax her out of her shell took delicate care and, unconsciously for me, many of the ideologies Lauer covers.

Only in college did I realize what studying English could entail. For the first time, I was able to see English as not just Shakespeare and five-sentence paragraphs. I fell in love with writing as a craft and being able to help others understand it. I know now that this is because of the nature of rhetoric and composition, being a “human science”, as described by Louise Wetherbee Phelps. I found it funny that as I read, I was able to connect ideas with experience: the theories of invention I had come across while generating writing across classes or the factors that influenced my feedback to students I tutored. What a surprise, I thought, that although I was not aware of the science, there exists a reason for the things I learned to do. More than that, while reading about the growth of the field of rhetoric, I was fascinated by the idea that composition had been, “considered only a teaching practice”. To me, it only made sense that the field grew. I was reminded of the saying: “how you do something is how you do everything”. The way we compose—the way we put together our words—is the basis of almost everything we do. It is how we express ourselves, why we write to-do lists, where we get the information to write a report. Of course it is natural that we study it.

I am excited to finally “put a name to the face”, or so to speak, with all I have learned about writing so far. During our check-ins last week, I spoke about how, for me, returning to school meant practicing being more deliberate. The information in this reading is similar. It forces me to look back on my learning experience with a new lens and pick it apart. When was I taught this idea? How? Which of these ideas do I subscribe to, and what experience taught me to think otherwise? Even the philosophical aspects, which I sometimes struggle to wrap my brain around, excite me. It feels like I am about to open a whole new set of toys with which to write with.

In reading Janice Lauer’s “Rhetoric and Composition”, I find myself thinking about my experience with the act of writing throughout my years in school. It feels odd to be able to put a name to all the work I’ve done before, both as a student and during my experience as a tutor. The margins of my print-out copy of the reading recall my experiences in the classroom: “i always talk about how students consider themselves ‘bad writers’” and “dr. walters is that you” in response to the idea of revision.

In particular, I found myself reflecting on what Lauer calls the current-traditional paradigm, and how for most of my life, writing was taught to be a challenge with subjective parameters. There was an idea of what good writing was, who did it, and where it could be found. Rhetoric was a two-day unit (vocabulary test included), and feedback from teachers focused on punctuation and sentence counts. This experience with writing often extended past me. When I talk about how people learn to write, I tend to refer back to a student of mine who considered herself a “bad writer”. In reality, her issue was a weak grasp on things like comma placement, something that we were able to fix in just a few tutoring sessions. Her voice, however, was something that seemed to come naturally. She was adamant that she wasn’t good at writing, and for the first half of the semester, was hesitant to engage with our class. I think years of being told writing could only be done a certain way taught her to feel shame in her work. To coax her out of her shell took delicate care and, unconsciously for me, many of the ideologies Lauer covers.

Only in college did I realize what studying English could entail. For the first time, I was able to see English as not just Shakespeare and five-sentence paragraphs. I fell in love with writing as a craft and being able to help others understand it. I know now that this is because of the nature of rhetoric and composition, being a “human science”, as described by Louise Wetherbee Phelps. I found it funny that as I read, I was able to connect ideas with experience: the theories of invention I had come across while generating writing across classes or the factors that influenced my feedback to students I tutored. What a surprise, I thought, that although I was not aware of the science, there exists a reason for the things I learned to do. More than that, while reading about the growth of the field of rhetoric, I was fascinated by the idea that composition had been, “considered only a teaching practice”. To me, it only made sense that the field grew. I was reminded of the saying: “how you do something is how you do everything”. The way we compose—the way we put together our words—is the basis of almost everything we do. It is how we express ourselves, why we write to-do lists, where we get the information to write a report. Of course it is natural that we study it.

I am excited to finally “put a name to the face”, or so to speak, with all I have learned about writing so far. During our check-ins last week, I spoke about how, for me, returning to school meant practicing being more deliberate. The information in this reading is similar. It forces me to look back on my learning experience with a new lens and pick it apart. When was I taught this idea? How? Which of these ideas do I subscribe to, and what experience taught me to think otherwise? Even the philosophical aspects, which I sometimes struggle to wrap my brain around, excite me. It feels like I am about to open a whole new set of toys with which to write with.