ENGL 5010: Week Three/Tuesday Slide Deck

ENGL 5010
Week Three:
Writing Research

Hardin Marshall & Lynch 83
Our innovation in these assignments
comes from reconceiving writing as
the laboratory in which thinking
occurs rather than the delivery
system of the results of thinking (i.e.,
the familiar argumentative product).

Hardin Marshall & Lynch 88
In effect, we are not asking students to make arguments but to
construct the laboratory in which arguments will be made.
We take the defamiliarization even further by asking students
to engage in writing, as Latour puts it, as a “means to learn
how to become sensitive to the contrary requirements, to the
exigencies, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where
none of them is really in command” (qtd. in Cooper 191).

Hardin Marshall & Lynch 93
Our purpose is of course not to endorse “both sides.” Indeed, one
of the effects of thorough research is the discovery that one opinion
is far more persuasive than another. At those points, students—
and all of us—need to be comfortable with the thought of
changing our minds. Moreover, “openness,” a value instantiated in
the 2011 CWPA Framework for Postsecondary Writing, is not
cultivated by simply leaving one’s mind unlocked. It is cultivated by
considering contrary opinions.

HOWARD AND JAMIESON 229
it is hard to look at the results of the
Citation Project research and imagine
that the assigning of traditional
research papers can be sustained in firstyear
writing (FTW) courses.

HOWARD AND JAMIESON 240
Without practice in engaged
reading, s t u d e n t c a n d o
nothing more than find killer
quotes, stitch them together,
cite them accurately, insert a
thesis, can call it a day.

Cooper 188
Experiments, whether in an actual
laboratory or in a written text, are a
way of engaging entities in a
trajectory of composing knowledge.

Cooper 186
If the student is to accompany entities in
maintaining their substance, he, therefore,
needs to engage in the parallel trajectory
of the composing of knowledge—serial
redescription.

Cooper 192
“Going ‘forward’ now means that we become more and
more ‘experienced,’ ‘cognizant,’ ‘attuned’ to the quality
of the collective, coordinated, instituted knowledge.” Other
requirements for the genesis of facts, which ends, rather
than begins, with “direct perception,” include “successive
rectification and revision” and “rectification by
colleagues.”

Cooper 193
What if writing teachers and their
students thought of research as empirical
and experimental—as producing new
knowledge, not reporting what is known?

Cooper 198
The student’s goal is perhaps
ethnographic: to “deploy the
content with all its connections” so as
to exhibit, not explain, the context.

Cooper 198
As she arranges them,
t h e y t a k e o n n e w
m e a n i n g s f r o m t h e
various juxtapositions she
tries out.

Norgaard 230
Teaching becomes opportune when we
listen to and address the class not as
students taking a writing course but as
writers working in a community of
writers.

Norgaard
231
In a sense, workshops and
seminars verbalize—and thus
make available—the hidden
dynamics of reader response.

Norgaard
232
Because workshops ask students to shuttle
back and forth between actual writing and
an array of potential strategies, we can
model those moves for them—and they
can test the moves on us.

Norgaard
233-34
If we are unhappy with the texts that
students bring into a workshop, or with the
discussion those texts elicit, we might look
to our own assignments as moments of
invention that shape the classroom.

Norgaard
233-34
Whatever option you choose, I encourage
responsible reading and constructive criticism
by putting readers on the line in class, lest
the authors of the drafts feel they’re the only
ones with a stake in the discussion.

Norgaard
240
That middle ground is techne—craft, knack,
know-how—and it becomes the stage on which
the workshop’s drama plays itself out. Techne is
associated with the creative process, with the
very “making” (poesis) of knowledge.

Rivers
EP
To write is to participate in language, culture and technology. To write is to participate
in language, which moves us and makes our minds. Research suggests that we think in
and with language. The language available to us affords and constrains how and what we
write: vocabulary, concepts, patterns of thought. To write is to participate in culture,
which is composed, in part, through shared texts: laws, religious writings, literature,
codes of conduct, advertisements. Culture supplies the forms and expectations that
shape how, when and why we write. To write is to participate in technology, through
which writing becomes possible: the alphabet, pen and paper, printing presses, word
processors as well as the networks that give rise to and support texts—their composition
and circulation. We take part in these networks of meaning and matter. And our taking
part is mutually informing: language, culture and technology are already on the
scene for us to take up—shaping us as the writers we (have) become.