Corder, Emig, & Murray

I went into the Corder reading with high expectations, looking forward to flowery language that was going to idealize what it means to be a story-teller and writer. While the author set the article up that way, I found myself wondering if the premise of the piece was really groundbreaking or if it was common sense disguised as a new idea. Corder's main idea is to say that the narratives we frame our lives with act as barriers to understanding and feeling empathy for the narratives of others. Throughout the course of the article, I found myself skimming through the dramatized language (which complicated the meaning) and trying to find the new (to me) concepts (like invention and steadfast). I felt that Corder's argument not only contradicted, but undermined itself, and left a lot to be explained.

Corder's article weaves through the argument by building principle on top of principle. For instance, Corder states that in order to fully understand each other's argument and benefit from dissimilar narratives, we must "adopt elements of the writer's position," meaning we much change our own narrative to understand that of others. However, in the next section, Corder explains that "steadfast" means that there are people who so fully identify and hold to their narrative that they will never be influenced by anyone else. That the two opposite arguments will never compromise or adapt. To that, Corder states, "That seems to picture a near-hopeless prospect" (23). His solution? "Change the way we talk about argument."

In this idea, I got lost, trying to figure out how changing the conception of argument would help those two opposing people (and opposing narratives) better understand one another. I found that Corder's argument (playing off of Rogers's) really just boiled down to "walk a mile in their shoes." To me, there wasn't anything really exciting or groundbreaking in this article. I wonder, "why does this matter?" "Do the opposing sides NEED a resolution?" "What does a compromise earn?" and most importantly, "how does this relate to rhetoric or writing?"

The title pulled me back - in thinking about all of this and trying to connect the dots, I thought of the title. "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love." Does that mean that Corder believes that successful writers always see and understand all sides of the argument? Does that mean that successful writing comes from a place of love? (Of loving everyone's narratives and adapting to them?) I find a lot of Corder's argument overly-sentimental and obvious, and perhaps I just somehow missed the thesis of the piece, but how is this helpful to rhetoricians and writers? Emergence means to expose something that was previously hidden - does Corder believe that we must expose our narratives and adapt to others? If so, what do we gain from it?

Corder states, "the major barrier to mutual interpersonal communication is our very natural tendency to judge, to evaluate, to approve or disapprove, the statement of the other person" (20). But then qualifies throughout the article that this is something we shouldn't be doing - as what? As humans? As writers? What purpose does it serve not to dissect the world and words around us? Besides making us into nicer people who "listen with understanding" who are able to walk a mile in each other's shoes, how does this help me become a better writer? A better rhetorician? What's the purpose? Why was this article written?

From an argument standpoint, hasn't it always been part of writing to understand the other side of the argument (and the validity of it) so that the writer can argue against it more strongly? Again, I wonder where the groundbreaking part of Corder's article is.

In short, I struggled with this one.

Writing As a Mode of Learning by Janet Emig made much more sense to me. Emig's article had some really intriguing ideas. I loved the connections she explored between talking and writing, but I wish her entire argument didn't depend entirely on the connection (or rather differences). I would've liked to see writing as a mode of learning without comparing it to talking. As for what the article did do, I actually learned a lot from it.

As someone who has been writing creatively and speaking (practically) my entire life, the point Emig made about writing and speaking happening differently was really fascinating and really hit home. Emig cast away that right-brain versus left-brain dichotomy and went into detail about how writing utilizes both sides of the brain. Likewise, she discusses writing as a learned process, compared to talking which is seemingly inherent. Along those same lines, Emig discusses receptive (talking) versus productive (writing), and the concepts of "creating" and "originating." This was a concept that I knew subconsciously, but had no name for. The idea of talking being something that goes "graphically unrecorded" while writing does not, was really something new to me. This concept built up the idea that writing is a successful learning tool because writers are then able to see all the earlier versions of writing and build from there. This made me consider how speeches, something obviously "talk" based, are often written out first. It's why presentations are rarely winged in the sense of just get up there and talk. Writing allows us to see and build upon the origin of thought, reframe, rephrase, and rewrite until we get from the beginning to where we need to be.

In her breakdown of the differences between writing and talking, one stuck out at me. Emig states, "Writing is stark, barren, even naked as a medium; talking is rich, luxuriant, inherently redundant." This was something that struck me as debatable. When I think "stark, barren, and naked," I picture a cursor blinking on a blank Word document, but even that isn't stark and barren - it's hopeful and open to possibility. I don't see writing as this empty thing; I imagine it as everything it can and will be. I wish Emig had explained this idea more, because writing itself isn't that cursor on a blank page. Writing is open to every possibility and only becomes lesser when we actually begin to write and narrow the subject. For me, writing is not going from nothing to something; it's going from everything to something. In that regard, I feel that it's also "rich," "luxuriant," and yeah, maybe somehow redundant in topic and how it happens.

I agree with Emig's overall premise that writing is a successful mode of learning - perhaps even one of the most useful. I do feel that the article was underdeveloped though, and could've been called, Why Writing is a Better Mode of Learning than Talking. It would've been interesting for her to extend the article and step away from the comparisons.

The third article, Donald M. Murray's Teaching Writing as a Process Not Product, fed into all my perfect-world utopian feelings about how teaching should work. In short, I agree with Murray, and I can't argue that his system isn't a better one than the grade-fueled system currently in place. I loved the autopsy metaphor that he used to explain the concept, and I loved the concepts, but I feel that they're unrealistic in a first-year composition course where many of the students aren't writers and don't want to be. I'll explain further, but basically I feel that students who need to be taught writing are often the ones who don't want to be writers - for everyone else, the process of learning writing happens organically and is simply honed in the classroom.

Murray's main purpose is to say that we need to throw away the systematic way we teach and grade writing. He wants a process-based system that rewards students for what WILL be, not what currently is. I agree that revision-based writing is really the ultimate way to teach students to be better writers, because there's no way any one is ever going to be a "perfect writer," That in itself is subjective and unattainable, so how, in our system where A often represents "perfect," can we assign letter grades to writing assignments that, in the style of Murray, are never really complete? Or could continuously improve?

The difficulty I have with Murray is that he idolizes writing the way I wanted Corder to do. For someone like me, who has been writing since before I could spell, who, at 6, signed a thank you card to a family member as "your friend, Maddi, the writer" - for someone like me, Murray's writing class sounds like a utopia. Sounds like every writing class I ever dreamed I'd end up in in college. The idea of "teach[ing] unfinished writing and [finding] glory in its unfinishedness" and "sharing with our students the continual excitement of choosing one word instead of another, of searching for the one true word," sounds absolutely perfect, like an amazing Friday night with writer friends. But for first-year composition students (none of whom out of my 43 this semester are going on to become writers), this sounds like too much to ask.

We can teach writing, but we can't force enthusiasm. We can't force students to get a thrill out of finding that just perfect word. I spend hours rephrasing my writing, making sure each paragraph, sentence, word has oomph, hits right on beat, but for many students at this level, writing means just putting words on paper until it's done. I wish I could supplant my enthusiasm into them. It would make class more like hanging out with likeminded friends rather than dragging excitement from students who requested "less writing assignments" and "more detailed prompts." At this level, I don't think Murray's style would work as well as he (and I) wish it could.

I do agree that the system needs to allow for prewriting and revision. Students need to understand that writing is a process that never ceases, and we need to emulate that for them in our controlled environment. There's no way to entirely allow for autonomy in the classroom. Murray suggests that we allow students to pick their subjects, to run without prompts and explanations that kill creativity, and to grade based on possibility, but it just can't work fully in a classroom at the first-year composition level.

Murray's idea of a writing class makes me think of the junior/senior creative writing practicum level, where all we did for two semesters straight was read our classmates's work and leave comments. This system worked for creative writing, for writers who actually thought of themselves as capital W- Writers. The room was filled with writers who were eager for feedback, eager to learn all they could to make a career out of this story-telling thing. There were no grades other than, "you turned something in between 10-25 pages and left feedback for your classmates." It worked - sort of - but we were Writers. We'd learned organically, pushed ourselves to write papers for classes and then stayed up too late and write for "fun." We were the students with ink in our blood and dozens of stories framing our pasts. Writing was our narrative, our identity. We weren't learning how to write, we were learning how to hone. Perhaps this is the type of writing classroom Murray was envisioning, but I don't think so. We weren't being taught, not really.