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August 31, 2006

encouragement from the mighty b:

(see, somebody's at least paying a *little* attention to my efforts at making headway here!)

remember that you don't need to know everything about qualitative methodologies; all you need to do is say "I'm going to do X and A,B, and C did it this way too" or "I'm going to do X and it diverges from what A & B did in the following ways, and here's why I'm diverging" and you don't have to have final answers to what/how you're doing after the prospectus hearing you'll do a pilot and see how that goes and then adjust as necessary the prospectus just convinces your committee that you know what you're doing and won't dig yourself into a hole that you can't write your way out of

(we'll leave the part where i couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag right now to pointless speculation. or at least to the excuse department busily cranking out explanations for the lack of progress on the prospectus...)

Posted by ttobryan at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)

closing out the category, alex

Foddy, William. Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in Social Research. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 1993.

reality-check-type stuff to remember about interviewing:

"the relationship between what respondents say they do and what they actually do is not always very strong" (usually more of a problem related to (a) things ppl are embarrassed about or otherwise afraid to reveal or think the researcher would judge them poorly if he/she knew or (b) recall of events or (c) the correlation between attitudes & actions, i.e. the chinese tourists example) (3)

many (incredibly obvious but also some less so) things (like wording, context, situation, question-length & complexity) influence respondants' answers to questions, s.a. their ordering; respondants will answer a question differently based on the influence of the questions that preceded it (7)

when writing questions: be sure you're crystal clear on your goal b4 you write any specific questions, keep the general-goal question handy when writing specific questions, & keep asking yourself 'why do i want to know this'--demand substantive relevance answers; curiosity isn't enough (32)

language is a barrier (40)--respondants may/will hear things differently from how researchers hear/intend them. you need to know what the question means to your respondant b4 you'll know what to do w/the response

"funnel sequence" (kahn and cannell 1957) of general-to-specific questioning works b/c "general questions are the most easily justified in terms of their relevance to the avowed purpose of the study" so "they serve as natural leads for more specific questions" (62)

it's been historically common for researchers to try to tell respondants as little as possible about the study's aims, in order to keep from inappropriately influencing responses, but the fundamental flaw in that approach is human nature: "when respondants are given only the vaguest of information about the purposes of the studies in which they are asked to participate, they are put in the position of having to make guesses about the researchers' requirements" (71)--& they're going to be just as influenced by those guesses about purpose as by knowing the real thing, only as a researcher you can't account for those influences b/c if they come from guesses inside respondants' heads, you don't know what they are.

"respondants do their best to answer all questions that are put to them--even those they have trouble interpreting. it seems that when respondents have difficulty interpreting a question they use all available clues to help them....clues afforded by the way...the question is worded; clues generated by the accompanying sets of response options; clues contained both in previous related questions and in the answers the respondents have already given...and clues afforded by the overall definition of the situation" (or what they imagine it to be). "the problems that arise when different respondents are influenced by different clues...can be lessened...by clearly defining the topic in specific, concrete terms and clearly spelling out the reason for asking the question so that there is no reason for respondents to fall back onto contextual clues in order to clarify the question for themselves" (75).

among the "topics that are seen to be 'socially undesirable' and are therefore under-reported": "illegal and contra-normative behavior" including "committing a crime" (118) <--be aware that this could get in the way when students' perceptions of questions lean in the direction of their perceptions of plagiarism-hysteria

the tricksy thing about open questions: although they have lots of benefits in terms of being open to respondents' presentations of their attitudes & reference-frames, their own readings of questions & situations, & their responses based on their values & concerns rather than as limited by pre-determined response options, when respondents fail to give complete or adequate answers, "probing" for those answers easily becomes overly directive, which might skew answers and, potentially, "turns [open questions] into closed questions" (135)

plus, coding is always murky (138).

piloting questions: is a good idea. "demario (1983:101) has proposed that interviewers work in pairs when piloting questions, so that one of them is free to concentrate fully on conducting the interview while the other is free to listen to and observe both the interviewer's and the respondent's behavior" and "converse and presser (1986) suggest that interviewers who carry out pilot surveys should be encouraged to make copious notes in the margins of the questionnaires while they are doing the interviews and that they should take part in group discussions once they have completed them, to help identify problem questions" (185)

one method of question-testing: "asking respondents to rephrase questions in their own words" to see what they're hearing (186)

Posted by ttobryan at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2006

a little more on interviews. emphasis on the "little"

Brenner, Michael, Jennifer Brown, and David Canter, Eds. The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. London: Academic P. 1985.

interviewing is valuable because of its "willingness to treat individuals as the heros of their own drama, as valuable sources of particular information" (3); "the interviewer should follow rules in his/her relationship with the informant....his/her questioning must always be nondirective; that is, must never suggest a 'right' answer or direction of answering; he/she must take care that the accounts obtained are adequate (as complete as possible, linguistically comprehensible, free of internal inconsistencies, for example); he/she must enact a facilitator role by being nonjudgmental and supportive" (159).

farraday and plummer: "sociologists using life history methods become more like a journalist, a novelist or a biographer" (p. 774). bertaux (1981) argues that the latter three roles are more effective agents for change than sociologists have ever been! (Benner et al 167)

& 169 a little digging into who's in control when in the research interview; technically the interviewer, by design, but the whole point of the open-ended form is that interviewees can take control & lead conversations in ways that account for their concerns, interests, anxieties relative to the topic.

tangential approaches: "asking a mother 'when did your child have flu?' is liable to produce error; some of this may be overcome if...other neutral marker events, such as birthdays and holidays, are used to build up a more accurate picture" (175).

----------------

Spradley, James P. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, 1979.

characteristics of the good informant: he/she is
thoroughly enculturated, currently involved in the place/time being studied, a member of a cultural scene not already too familiar to the beginning researcher, able to make enough time available to be worked with, & nonanalytic: i.e. won't try to overexplain & do the researcher's job for him/her (46).

seemingly innocent questions like "what do you mean" or "why did you do that" can threaten responders b/c they "contain a hidden judgmental component. louder than words, they seem to shout, 'you haven't been clear; you haven't explained adequately; you are hiding the true reasons for what you told me'"--so ethnographic interviewing tries to avoid these questions, going instead for versions of "can you describe a situation wherein you might do x" as a way of finding out more indirectly & as less of a challenge what x means to the responder (82).

you don't always know what's relevant contextual information or whether your questions will be meaningful to your "informants" (ugh) unless/until you test them on representatives of your population (116-117).

Posted by ttobryan at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2006

tracks in the rain (cuz it's too early for snow)

my Right This Minute & Subject to Plenty of Potential Change hypothesis (b/c kvale says i have to have one):

experienced & inexperienced academic writers use sources differently (with differing levels of canonical acceptability/appropriateness) b/c they have fundamentally different sense of the purpose & value of including the works/words/ideas of others in their writing

plus other methodologically-proximal thinking: 10-15 is avg # of interviewees (kvale 102); 9-12? 3-4 of each frosh, srs or MA 1st years, & published/ing faculty? B says 1 or 2 categories only: frosh & grads 2-3 years in? fac. seems too specialized to pair reasonably w/freshman (most of whom aren't going career-academic--will we be able to learn things that'll reasonably serve the population by that comparison?)

can i collect only frosh who think they want to stay in academia? (yes, but will that defeat the purpose--it'll only be informative then about teaching academic writing to lifetime academics, when our job is to teach it to everybody just passing through)

transcription/recording: can i do this side-by-side w/writers at a shared computer screen, adding comment-bubbles as transcription of conversations? test this!

p. 125 in kvale: from spradley ("an open phenomenological approach to learning from the interviewee is well expressed by")

i want to understand the world from your point of view. i want to know what you know in the way you know it. i want to understand the meaning of your experience, to walk in your shoes, to feel things as you feel them, to explain things as you explain them. will you become my teacher and help me understand? (34)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)

InterViews

Kvale, Steinar. InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. London: Sage P. 1996.

...in which our intrepid hero fights hard against the tangent-urge to kvetch at length about the graduate education system (why am i doing self-guided study for my dissertation in my sixth straight year of grad school before i encounter a text that actually & usefully defines "hermeneutics" and "phenomenology"?) & quarrels at length with the internal (il)logic of definitions & co[ntrasting]/[laborative] theoretical systems...

basic definition (from preface): "interviews are conversations where the outcome is a coproduction of the interviewer and the subject" (xvii)

traveler metaphor: in addition to wandering around talking to whomever he/she encounters, "the traveler may also deliberately seek specific sites or topics by following a method, with the original Greek meaning of 'a route that leads to the goal.' the interviewer wanders along with the local inhabitants, asks questions that lead the subjects to tell their own stories of their lived world, and converses with them in the original Latin meaning of conversation as 'wandering together with'" + "the journey may not only lead to new knowledge; the traveler might change as well" (4).

the book's particular domain: the "semistructured life world interview" defined as "an interview whose purpose is to obtain descriptions of the life world of the interviewee with respect to interpreting the meaning of the described phenomena"--& i want my interviewees to do as much of the interpreting as they can so that i'm not imposing upon them any more than is absolutely necessary.

Conversation is an ancient form of obtaining knowledge. Thucydides interviewed participants from the Peloponnesian Wars to write the history of the wars, and Socrates used dialogue to obtain philosophical knowledge.

necessary disclaimer: "the interview...is neither a progressive nor an oppressive method....the knowledge produced can be used either to enhance the inbestigated subjects' condition or to manipulate their behavior more efficiently" (11)

more definitions: "technically, the qualitative research interview is semistructured: it is neither an open conversation nor a highly structured questionnaire. it is conducted according to an interview guide that focuses on certain themes and that may include suggested questions. the interview is usually transcribed, and the written text together with the tape recording are the material for the subsequent interpretation of meaning" (27); in the model provided "the interviewer's questions aimed at a cognitive clarification of the subject's story....the mode of interviewing was inspired by a phenomenological philosophy, which is based on a descriptive study of consciousness" (29)

where it gets tricksy: "the interviewer registers and interprets what is said as well as how it is said; he or she must be observant of--and able to interpret--vocalization, facial expressions, and other bodily gestures. an everyday conversation often takes place on a factual level. a pupil may state: 'i am not as stupid as my grades at the examinations showed, but i have bad study habits.' common reactions could then be on a factual level: 'what grades did you get?' or 'what are your study habits?'--questions that also may yield important information. a meaning-oriented reply would, in contrast, be something like, 'you feel that the grades are not an adqueate measure of your competence?'....it is necessary to listen to the explicit descriptions and meanings as well as to what is 'said between the lines.' the interviewer may seek to formulate the 'implicit message,' 'send it back' to the subject, and obtain an immediate confirmation or disconfirmation of the interviewer's interpretation of what the interviewee is saying" (32) <--& if you're doing that, then interpretation--b/c it's collaborative--seems less iffy, although i still imagine ugrads, anyway, saying yes to restatements they don't really follow. but this makes me twitchy: "the question of why the subjects experience and act as they do is primarily a task for the researcher to evaluate. an analogy to a doctor's diagnosis may be clarifying" (32)... or thoroughly obfuscating, since doctors mostly diagnose based on lists of symptoms observed in past patients, not on interpretive guesses about causality...

done properly, the qual. reserch interview "is focused on certain themes in the interviewee's life world. it is neither strictly structured with standardized questions, nor entirely 'nondirective,' but....the interviewer leads the subject toward certain themes, but not to certain opinions about these themes" (34).

rorty ("a neopragmatist philosopher") on knowledge: "the notion of mind as re-presenting an objective world can be discarded, 'if we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' (rorty, 1979, p. 171). the certainty of our knowledge is a matter of conversation between persons, rather than as a matter of interaction with a nonhuman reality. if we regard knowing not as having an essence but as a right to believe, we may see 'conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is understood' (p. 389)" (37).

gadamer & shotter: conversation is how human creatures construct reality: conversation in interviewing "is not only a specific empirical method: it also involves a basic mode of constituting knowledge; and the human world is a conversational reality" (37).

gooey border-drawing interviewing (like this) has theoretical bases in: postmodern thought, hermeneutics, phenomenology, & dialectics; "a phenomenological perspective includes a focus on the life world, an openness to the experiences of the subjects, a primacy of precise descriptions, attempts to bracket foreknowledge, and a search for invariant essential meanings in the descriptions" (38-9). [begin creep factor here: "invariant essential meanings"? on this planet?]

from PoMo we get "Knowedge as Conversation" (rorty, gadamer, shotter), "Knowledge as Narrative" (lyotard), "Knowledge as Language" (presumably derrida et. al.--he doesn't specify), "Knowledge as Context" (again) & "Knowledge as Interrelational" (more lyotard + merleau-ponty, both of whose work he calls phenomenological) (40-4)

[what separates the "hermeneutic meaning interpretation" (which is so interpretation-oriented & determinedly textual that i'm shoving it aside) from seeking (& creating by interpretive moves) "invariant essential meaning"?]

phenomenological description: "is based on phenomenology in the sense of understanding social phenomena from the actors' own perspectives, describing the world as experienced by the subjects, and with the assumption that the important reality is what people perceive it to be" (52) [which to me flies like a red flag of contrast against that invariant-essential business...] "[it] is interested in elucidating both that which appears and the manner in which it appears. it studies the subjects' perspectives on their world; attempts to describe in detail the content and structure of the subjects' consciousness, to grasp the qualitative diversity of their experiences" [good so far, BUT-->] "and to explicate their essential meanings." [doesn't essentializing meaning drown complexity/reality in really ungood ways? danger danger-->] "phenomenology attempts to get beyond immediately experienced meanings in order to articulate the prereflective level of lived meanings, to make the invisible visible" (53)(by inventive interpretation? this sounds like exactly what i don't want to be doing--yet isn't it also an accurate presentation of what i propose? i want to know what writers' (invisible) reasons are for their (visible) actions... but i don't want to impose a reading on their experiences; i want to know what they think they're doing.)

description of open description: (spiegelberg) "'keeping the eyes open,' 'not think, but see.' according to merleau-ponty (1962), what matters is to describe the given as precisely and completely as possible; to describe rather than explain or analyze." [right! does this only seem to fold back on itself to me?] "phenomenology is the attempt at a direct description of experience, without any considerations about the origin or cause of an experience. in phenomenological philosophy, objectivity is reached through intentional acts of consciousness and is an expression of fidelity to the phenomena investigated" ...until "in the investigation of essences one shifts from describing separate phenomena to searching for their common essence....this means varying a given phenomenon freely in its possible forms, and that which remains constant through the different variations is the essence..." (53).

bracketing: "a phenomenological reduction calls for a suspension of judgment as to the existence or nonexistence of the content of an experience" & "can be pictured as a 'bracketing,' an attempt to place the common sense and scientific knowledge about the phenomena within parentheses in order to arrive at an unprejudiced description of the essence.... [it] does not involve an absolute absence of presuppositions, but rather a critical analysis of one's own presuppositions" (54).

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless, the whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experiences of the world of which science is the second order expression. (p.viii) --merleau-ponty (1962)

acknowledgement of contradictions: "both phenomenology and dialectics seek the essences beneath the manifest appearances, while in postmodern thought the appearance has become the essence" (58) <--but i don't think this either; writers cite poorly not b/c they don't know how (appearance) but because they don't know why (how-purpose vs. how-implementation)

objectivity: as freedom from bias (is untenable), as reliability (don't we already have a term for that?), & as "reflecting the nature of the object researched" (we have a term for that too: suitability) (65).

methods: 7 stages of an interview investigation
thematizing--hypotheses & general questions
designing--specific questions aimed at testing the hypothesis
interviewing
transcribing
analyzing
verifying
reporting (81)

in academic journals, the what-i-did component of the write-up has to always look like "a distorted technical picture of scientific research as a logical, linear process" that of course it isn't/never was (83).

thematizing: most studies have methodological problems b/c they try to assign "how"s to their plans before thoroughly developing their "what"s and "why"s. don't. (95).

designing: develop your overview before you start (carefully), remember how many factors are interdependent (most of them), "keep the endpoint in sight" ("stay on target"), don't procrastinate, & expect to learn/evolve work along the way (99-100).

ethics: have some.

proceedures: "the interview is a stage upon which knowledge is constructed through the interaction of interviewer and interviewee roles"; "the interviewees should be provided with context....the context is introduced with a briefing in which the interviewer defines the situation for the subject; briefly tells about the purpose of the interview, the use of a tape recorder, and so on; and asks if the subject has any questions before starting the interview....the first minutes of an interview are decisive. the subjects will want to have a grasp of the interviewer before they allow themselves to talk freely....a good contact is established by attentive listening, with the interviewer showing interest, understanding, and respect for what the subject says; at the same time, the interviewer is at ease and clear about what he or she wants to know. the initial briefing should be followed up by a debriefing after the interview....there may be some tension or anxiety, because the subject has been open about often personal and emotional experiences...the interaction can be rounded off by the interviewer mentioning some of the main points learned from the interview. the subject may then want to comment on this feedback. the interaction can thereafter be concluded by the interviewer saying, for example, 'i have no further questions. do you have anything more you want to bring up, or ask about, before we finish the interiew?'" (128).

types of interview question:
introducing questions: "can you tell me about...?"
follow-up questions
probing questions: "could you say something more about that?"
specifying questions
direct questions: "have you ever done x"
indirect questions "how do you believe most people feel about x"
structuring questions: "now i want to ask instead about"
silence (ah, wait time)
interpreting questions: "you then mean that...?" (133-5)

transcription is inherently interpretive (160). duh.

more don'ts: don't collect 1000 pages of shit what needs transcription (181)! (a) plan better, (b) focus your questioning/recording, & (c) "the interviewee's statements are not collected--they are coauthored by the interviewer" (183)

strategies: categorization, condensation, narrative structuring, & "ad hoc tactics"--do what makes sense in the scenario: from miles & huberman--> "noting patterns, themes (1), seeing plausibility (2), and clustering (3)....making metaphors (4)....counting (5).... making contrasts/comparisons (6).... partitioning variables (7) .... subsuming particulars under the general (8); factoring (9)....noting relations between variables (10); and finding intervening variables (11)...building a logical chain of evidence(12) and making conceptual/theoretical coherence (13)" (204).

beware the "pervasiveness of interpretation"; doesn't happen @ the analysis stage only but is always happening (205).

plurality of interpretation (210): me & the writers themselves? hope that's plural enough...

Posted by ttobryan at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2006

on writing centers & conference-conversations

i need better resources. i brought these home from the library:

Briggs, Lynn & Meg Woolbright, Eds. Stories from the Center: Connecting Narrative and Theory in the Writing Center. Urbana, IL: NCTE. 2000.

Grimm, Nancy Maloney. Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton Cook P. 1999.

Sperling, Melanie. "I Want to Talk to Each of You: Collaboration and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference." Research in the Teaching of English. 24: 3 (Oct. 1990). 279-321.

i was hoping for something pedagogical, methodological, about talking to students about their words-on-pages in ways that don't pre-determine everything for them so that you're really only hearing yourself echoed back. i didn't find it.

a few minutely-useful gems:

sperling
terms from her abstract: this is a "descriptive quantitative discourse analysis of conference talk across students and descriptive qualitative case study analysis within students" (279); in more words "analysis is thus in two parts: (a) a descriptive quantitative analysis, across cases, of teacher-student writing conferences for the six focal students, based on their conference transcripts, and (b) descriptive case studies within the six individual students across time, informed by all data sources" (290)--picking the 2 for the latter was based on maximum contrast.

interviewing w/o influencing is impossible: much of the purpose of this study is to show "how, participating in the explicit dialogue of teacher-student conversation, students collaborate in the often implicit act of acquiring and developing written language" (282).

how not to write this disclaimer? "while, as case study students from a descriptive study, they do not 'represent' a larger population of students, they make up a fair microcosm of the variety of students in this ninth-grade english course" (285).

coding/classifying: "i studied the conferences for content as well as for structure as both...had functional relevance. in identifying discourse categories...i was guided by the work of campbell (1986), green & wallat (1981), gumperz (1982), mehan (1979) and wells (1981)" (290)--> but as a loose basis, not a determining guide. "i designated each conversational turn as either (a) request, (b) compliance, (c) offer, (d) acceptance, (e) question, (f) answer" (293)

teacher she observed met w/students having already commented in writing on their first drafts & was bringing those comments to them at the meeting(?); then "using his comments as a springboard" he'd initiate conversations by asking questions (307).

grimm

reminder: the culture of the academy is a culture. indoctrinating others into it--or studying the failures of their indoctrination--is still indoctrination.

to one of her students, "because he was born into the dominant culture, he has been rewarded for understanding and following the dominant expectations. and because his white middle-class background is congruent with the cultural milieu of school, he is able to discern what is expected in terms of topic development and structure. to him, school has been fair, and it seems intuitively obvious that one would follow directions and do what the teacher requires. to him, truth lies in the details of the assignment sheet" (101) <--& if we assume this is blanket-true, we lose touch completely w/reality.

Posted by ttobryan at 02:14 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2006

drafty biblies (wow has my command of the language left me)

here's, um, part 1. or 0.1. or something. of a list.

prospectus bibliography so far:

Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill, 1982. 185-93.

Bazerman, Charles. "Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts." What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003. 83-96.

Berkenkotter, Carol, Thomas N. Hucken, & John Ackerman. "Social Context and Socially Constructed Texts." in Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis. Madison, WN: U Wisconsin P. 1991. 191-215. (is it wrong to put in your bib works you specifically want NOT to emulate?)

Brandt, Deborah Text and context: How writers come to mean1986In Couture, Barbara (Ed.), Functional approaches to writing research perspectives; Norwood, NJ: Ablex 93-107.

Brannon, Lil and C. B. Knoblauch. "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response." College Composition and Communication. 33.2 (May 1982) 157-66. (to me this is actually about/influential of methodology rather than content)

Brodkey, Linda. Academic writing as social practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1987.

Brown, J. and D. Canter. "The Uses of Explanation in the Research Interview." The Research Interview: Uses and Approaches. Ed. M. Brenner, J. Brown, and D. Canter. New York: Academic P, 1985. 217-245.

Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: SU of New York P, 1999.

Corbett, Edward P.J. "The Theory and Practice of Imitation in Classical Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 22 (1971): 243-50.

Day, Kami, and Michele Eodice. (First Person)2: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy. Logan: Utah State UP, 2001.

Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. "Beyond 'The Subject': Individuality in the Discursive Condition." New Literary History 31.3 (Summer 2000).

Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 1917. Selected Essays, 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. 3-11. Rpt. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Ed. Seán Burke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1995. 73-80.

Freedman, Sarah Warshauer, and A.M. Katz. "Pedagogical Interaction During the Composing Process: The Writing Conference." Writing in Real Time: Modeling Production Processes. Ed. Ann Matsuhashi. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987. 58-80.

Fontana, Andrea, and James Frey. "Interviewing: The Art of Science." Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. 47-78.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Donald Bouchard, Ed. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Trans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977.

Gray-Rosendale, Laura. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. 2000.

Greene, Stuart. "Making Sense of My Own Ideas: The Problems of Authorship in a Beginning Writing Classroom." Written Communication 12.2 (April 1995): 186-218.

Harris, Joseph. "From the Editor: The Work of Others." College Composition and Communication. 45.4 (Dec. 1994) 439-41.

Herrington, Anne J. "Teaching, Writing, and Learning: a Naturalistic Study of Writing in an Undergraduate Literature Course." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 133-66.

Horner, Bruce. "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition." College English 59.5 (1997): 505-29.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Perspectives on Writing: Theory, Research, Practice. Ser. 2. Stamford, CT: 1999.

Kvale, Steinar. Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996.

LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

Lunsford, Andrea A., and Lisa Ede. "Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 417-38.

Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.

Mortensen, Peter, and Gesa E. Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing." College Composition and Communication. 44.4 (1993): 556-572.

Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1997.

Odell, Lee and Dixie Goswami "Writing in a Nonacademic Setting" Ed. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell. New Directions in Composition Research. Guilford P. New York: 1984. 225-258.

Odell, Lee, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington. "The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings." Research on Writing: Principles and Methods. Ed. P. Mosenthal, L. Tamor, and S. Walmsley. New York: Longman, 1983. 221-235.

Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 317-345.

Peters, John Durham. "John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 75.4 (1989) 387-399.

Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.

Reither, James and Douglas Vipond. "Writing as Collaboration." College English. 51.8 (Dec 1989) 855-67.

Robillard, Amy E. Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority: Co-Investigation and Representations of Student Writers in Composition Studies. Diss. Syracuse University, 2004.

Rymer, Jone. "Scientific Composing Processes: How Eminent Scientists Write Journal Articles." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 211-50.

Scollon, Ron. "Plagiarism and Ideology: Identity in Intercultural Discourse." Language in Society 24.1 (March 1995): 1-28.

Spellmeyer, Kurt. "Inventing the University Student." Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 39-44.

Sperling, Melanie. "I Want to Talk to Each of You: Collaboration and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference." Research in the Teaching of English 24 (October 1990): 279-321.

Spradley, James P. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, 1979.

[Thompson, Celia Helen. Plagiarism or intertextuality? A study of the politics of knowledge, identity and textual ownership in undergraduate student writing. Thesis. U of Technology, Sydney. 2006.] c'mon, CHT, publish this already! 

Williamson, Micheal M. "A Model for Investigating the Functions of Written Language in Different Disciplines." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 89-132.

Woodmansee, Martha. "The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the 'Author.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1984): 425-48.

Woodmansee, Martha. "On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity." The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 15-28.

Posted by ttobryan at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2006

starting the drafting of the pre-drafty start

it's all behind the cut. b/c i don't want it showing up as easily readable/searchable. b/c it doesn't even make any sense yet. it's just a first stab. into a pile of jello miles deep. with a needle pretending to be a rapier. in the hand of a mouse. w/o even opposable thumbs. but you gotta start somewhere.

introduction/abstract? (in some examples this is the same section; in others it's not)

theoretical/disciplinary contexts (1 sec. in tracy's; 2 in amy's)

Although the motivations for this study are primarily pragmatic and pedagogical in nature, and as such arise from the intersection of my classroom experiences with such broad disciplinary concerns as the nature of academic writing and the degree to which academic writing is teachable vs. an aptitude some possess and others lack, and such culturally-specific influences as the current media hysteria about plagiarism, the primary theoretical influence on this work comes from authorship studies, particularly its demonstration of the discrepancies between how we as a field conceptualize the author and how writers'—particularly our students'—understandings of themselves as authors (or non-authors) play out in their authoring of texts.

In authorship studies, a number of projects have variously examined [what, exactly? data data data]. Few, however, at least outside the specific contexts of seeking solutions to "the plagiarism problem," have looked closely at what I consider the pivot-point of writers' authorial coming-out[yes, this is a fraught metaphor. i kinda like it. i'll think more about whether it's usable or not. might requre too much of a tangent to explain; it's illuminative, though. we do have to "out" ourselves as writers when we work with others' texts effectively. we can't just hide behind culturally-inscribed notions of "information"; we have to explain (often defensively, & to an uncertain reception) our (personal) relationships to ideas & other writers.]: the points in their texts where they share authorial voice with other thinkers and writers, where they position themselves in relation to those other voices, as framers and re-staters of others' words, as co-representers to their audiences of ideas they need the work of others to completely convey.

methodology

In this dissertation, I will investigate these notions of authorship, textual ownership, and authorial intent by examining the current practices of varyingly experienced writers authoring texts in collaboration with the spoken ideas and existing texts of other authors. Believing that these are common cultural challenges among academic writers, challenges that these writers confront regularly in their own work and attempt to overcome using a variety of strategies, some more successful than others, some the result of deliberate instruction but many the product of writers' interpretation of cultural expectations, I will call upon writers within the academy, both more and less experienced at integrating the ideas and words of others into their own prose, to consider and describe their own actions and rationale. To that end, I will conduct and analyze the results of conversational, semi-structured interviews with writers and collaborative examination of writers' sample texts. This project will draw on both interview methodology [inc/s.a.] and one-on-one teaching strategies such as those practiced in writing center pedagogy [inc/s.a.].

projected chapter breakdown

Following LGR—it's hard to be too specific doing this while trying to retain an open-ended questioning approach to this project. I have hypotheses about the phenomena I expect to observe and about their sources, but I'm hesitant to overdetermine my reading of writers' contributions and responses by sketching out what I expect to find.

1. (Guiding metaphors—autonomy vs. participatory authority) [introduce/rationale for project (major claims/argument)]

This chapter will propose that the ways inexperienced and experienced academic writers percieve their authorial roles are different, and that those different perceptions directly influence the way these writers approach textual tasks involving the collaborative interaction of their words and ideas with those of others (as in the production of researched texts and research-based arguments). To this end, this chapter will review [am I allowed to use Amy's diss. as a resource for my own? not too much of it, of course; it's not established & overflowing with old school field validity. but her students' comments, for example?]

Posted by ttobryan at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2006

surveys for dummies [methodology]

Anderson, Paul V. "Survey Methodology." Writing in Nonacademic Settings. Ed. Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami. New York: Guilford P. 1985.

reviews terms & basic statistics (outline behind cut)

survey methodology:

Posted by ttobryan at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

rymer (in jolliffe) quickly [methodology]

Rymer, Jone. "Scientific Composing Processes: How Eminent Scientists Write Journal Articles." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 211-50.

methods: "this investigation of scientists' production of primary scientific discourse used two research methods: (a) interviews of several scientists to build a framework to conduct and interpret in-depth case studies, while identifying subjects for composing aloud; and (b) case studies of some scientists from the panel writing journal articles while composing aloud….the scientists were interviewed for 1 to 3 hours using an audiotaped open-questionnairre method. the conversations were guided by a set of questions focusing on attitudes toward writing, individual composing procedures, and criteria for writing scientific papers, but also dealing with contextual influences, collaborative authorship arrangements, and training graduate students to write. each scientist discussed his work (all the subjects are male) by showing drafts and finished products of journal articles in progress or recently completed. all the scientists were asked to participate in a case study using the method of composing aloud" (217). & only 1 of them actually ended up able to do the compose-aloud-simultaneous-to-writing thing; the others found it too inhibitive or difficult or frustrating, which means that you can only get writing data, using this method, from writers who can do both things—hardly representative of the mental processes of all writers! (218).

Posted by ttobryan at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)

herrington (in jolliffe) less quickly [methodology]

Herrington, Anne J. "Teaching, Writing, and Learning: a Naturalistic Study of Writing in an Undergraduate Literature Course." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 133-66.

method: "the study uses a combination of methods associated with naturalistic research, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches and such specific methods as a survey questionairre, participant-observation, interviews with students and professors, and text analysis" (133-4)

participants: "the seven students chosen for the intensive study represented the range of students enrolled in the course. four were beginning literature students in their second through fifth semester who had taken only one or no college literature courses….three were more experienced literature students in their sixth through eighth semester who had already taken five or more literature courses" (135); "in addition… a larger sample of students and faculty was also consulted to obtain information about the larger community of which the primary participants were a part. the students included 35 members of the class who completed a survey about functions and audiences…" (136).

instrumentation: (1) writing questionairre: "respondants were given a list of six possibilities and asked to rate each on an ordinal response continuum….they also completed open-ended questions asking about primary and secondary audiences, characteristcs of the primary audience, and their own definitions of the purposes they had indicated were primary (e.g. what does 'demonstrating knowledge' mean to you?). students completed the questionairre twice, immediately after finishing each major writing assignment. the faculty completed it once" (136) (2) participant-observation (she went to class) (3) interviews: "during the first interview…the students were asked to elaborate on their questionnairre responses and interpret the professor's in-class explanation of the assignment….in the first interview, they also complete discourse-based interviews about their first papers….the intervew procedure involved asking each student about specific sections (each ranging in length from one word to a sentence) of his or her paper" (137); "the second interviews…included a second discourse-based interview on this assignment and questions about interviewees' perceptions of the professor's manner of teaching. as one part of the interview, interviewees were given transcripts of the beginning of two class sessions…" (137). (4) analysis of students' writing: using Toulmin's def. of "claims," she examined claims, including "classificatory statements," & "statements that identify an attribute," "inference statements that exlicitly or implicitly refer to an effect" (138), "first" by classifying "them according to types" & then by analyzing "the way the issues were formulated in the less- versus more-successful papers" (where success was measured by researchers' & her grad students' judgments & by the prof's evaluations) (139).

Posted by ttobryan at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

williamson (in jolliffe) less quickly [methodology]

Williamson, Micheal M. "A Model for Investigating the Functions of Written Language in Different Disciplines." Advances in Writing Research Volume Two: Writing in Academic Disciplines. Ed. David A. Jolliffe. Ablex: Norwood, NJ. 1988. 89-132.

informant selection process: involved asking around, working toward a range of disciplinary representation, conversations w/department chairs to suggest members of each department to work with, & "the purpose of having two informants [from each discipline] was to provide a basis for cross checking the views of each with the other"; b/c department chairs knew this was a writing-instruction study, their recommendations were somewhat biased (100-1). (at what point is that actually bias & not just reasonable selection? don't you want to work with people who have some interest in your study, because disinterested participants won't offer much energy/inspired insight?)

data collection: "scheduled data collection was based upon two interviews with each participant, the first as a data collection session and the second as a confirmation session. comparison of data collected in the first interview with data collected in the second interview, comparison of data collected with the other informant in each department, and comparison of the data collected in other departments allowed for a cross-checking strategy which triangulated each informant, as a data source, with at least three other data sources. i conducted the first interview with all participants before conducting any confirmation interviews, to be sure that i had an opportunity to gather all possible themes" (101).

"i tape-recorded both of the scheduled interviews, because it allowed for a permanent record of everything said, but left me free to concentrate on the substance of the interview itself (Mosher & Kalton, 1972). Belson (1967) reports that the accuracy of responses in his sample was not affected by the use of tape recorder, although upper social classes tended to have slightly reduced linguistic accuracy when taped, possibly because they are monitoring their speech. on the other hand, Diesing cites a study by Clark (1965) which reports that informant responses of academics are likely to be more carefully considered and formal when they believe that their statements will be recorded verbatim and transcribed. (this part is the greatest! –say what!?!?) since most academics are used to having students record their lectures, i do not believe that the taping was intrusive" (101).

"the first interview with each informant was planned around a loose schedule which began with my clarifying the purpose of the study. i then asked… [sequence of questioning follows] during this interview, i also solicited documents, in the form of course syllabi, assignment sheets, and student papers. these i examined with the informant at this interview. in the second interview with each informant, i showed tentative models of the role of written language in his or her course and his or her scholarship as these models related to the discipline and the university and invited him or her to confirm, reject, or revise these models with me. at the same time, i cross checked information from other informants and solicited further information to clarify details… (101-2)" (& at what point does cross-checking become providing "answers" & muddying your data-set? can i say to my writers, "one of your peers described it this way; how does that description work for you?" & use the answers? or is that me telling them what to think/say?)

Posted by ttobryan at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)

brandt quickly [methodology]

Brandt, Deborah. Literacy as Involvement: The Acts of Writers, Readers, and Texts. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale IL. 1990.

framing & data-collecting (reading as a facet of involvement): "the following descriptive data is drawn from a larger study of some twenty-five hours of think-aloud protocols rendered by the two students. here i concentrate on three think-aloud protocols by each student as he wrote first drafts on three assigned topics. both writers knew they would have an opportunity to revise the drafts before they were formally due….my questions were these: what role did reading play in the conduct of the two writers' composing processes? what were the writers doing immediately before and immediately after reading occurred? what differences emerge between the writers in their uses of reading during writing?" (51)
defining terms: i counted 'reading' as any instance in which a writer interrupted other composing activities to read or scan a sentence or more of inscription" (51-2).

Posted by ttobryan at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2006

the infamous nate [methodology]

Berkenkotter, Carol, Thomas N. Hucken, & John Ackerman. "Social Context and Socially Constructed Texts." in Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis. Madison, WN: U Wisconsin P. 1991. 191-215.

what they did to him: "this data, which consisted of nate's written self reports chronicling his experiences in the program, weekly taped interviews, copies of papers the students wrote, as well as CB's field notes, were reduced and translated into a narrative of Nate's progress as a writer during his first year. this part of the data analysis was carried out by CB and JA. the remaining author (TH), using a series of linguistic measures, independently analyzed the papers nate wrote" (192).

& nate's contribution to this interpretation/analysis? (yes, i know, he published an elaboration/answer/rebuttal under his real name later, but it didn't really add anything methodological, except for underscoring his level of distance from the interpretive actions of the study-team.)

Posted by ttobryan at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

LGR [methodology]

Gray-Rosendale, Laura. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. 2000.

what she mostly does rhetorically: narrative/anecdotal descriptions of her experience + conversational records of students' interactions, reported-on & analyzed through a particular amalgimated theoretical lens.

what she mostly makes the amalgamation of: "ethnomethodology" (32), conversation analysis (35), & Goffman's work w/"conversation, social constructionism, and dramaturgical performance" (39)

why this focus: "unlike ethnomethodology or conversation analysis, the participant in conversation is the center of analysis within Goffman's (1959, 1969, 1981, 1982, 1986) analytic. the participant can radically transform the contexts of interaction through her or his involvement" in the interaction, significantly through making use of or contradicting in order to change "cultural frames"--"primary frameworks are schemata of interpretation that people employ to ascribe meaning to a situation" & "by framing an event, participants characterize the event as well as their performance in it" (41) (watching students do this w/each other shows LGR how they percieve situations & their place(s) within them, & how they move to change those positions). & adding "Garfinkle's theories of microlevel social arrangements with the theories of social construction that now dominate basic writing...helps to clarify how students' language choices at a microlevel operate to question as well as sustain social relationships" (43).

also very useful: Richard Buttny's terminology & his correlation of "the oral phenomena of accounts with the various sophisticated rhetorical tasks that are part of persuasive, academic writing"; "much like written discourse, to be convincing, an account has to distinguish and take into consideration the possible reality constraints of the particular speech situation. this encompasses both a rhetorical understanding of the severity of the situation at hand and the audience's background knowledge, beliefs about the situation, and values" (45).

what she did: made transcripts of students' conversations w/in peer groups & included in the published study excerpts "periodically interrupted by cursory analyses of the ways in which...politeness strategies, calling to account, folk logics, framing, and constructing of roles, audience, and agency, and social, political, and cultural context...might be thought to work within the particular exchange documented" (71).

is the turn here from what seems useful/valuable to exactly what i want most not to do clear enough as-is, or do i have to explain?

include all necessary disclaimers: "one cannot help but be impacted by one's member knowledge.... i may certainly have been predisposed to certain hearings"; "i tried insofar as i was able to set aside many constructive analytic interpretations, focusing instead of trying to discover phenomena, i would wager that all researchers' analyticl interpretations, no matter how careful, involve some form of constructions" (74)

Posted by ttobryan at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2006

"new" directions [methodology]

Beach, Richard and Lillian S. Bridwell, Eds. New Directions in Composition Research. Guilford P. New York: 1984.

termdropping: "measures currently employed in composition research" (in 1984) "primary trait scoring, cohesion analysis, matrix analysis…"; new directions indicated by "the established but often untapped disciplines of rhetorical and logical analysis, as well as the more current information/text-processing theories." addn'ly, protocol analysis: "the application of cognitive-psychological or problem-solving methods through analyses of writers' discussions about their composing process" (but it isn't really; it's their narration during, doing "think-aloud"s) (15). "ethnographic research methods [applied] to the study of writing in particular social or cultural contexts…attempt[] to describe phenomena in the contexts in which they occur"—"the real world." "from these observations and from interview data, the investigator begins to determine subjects' perceptions—of themselves as writers, of their audience, and of the situation—and how these perceptions influence their writing performance" (16). so if i'm just interviewing & *not* following them around to watch them write, is what i'm doing still "ethnographic" b/c its interest in on writers' perceptions of their in-context tasks? or is it not b/c all of my researching is removed from those contexts? i don't (think i) need "text linguistics" b/c it's all about cohesion emerging/changing via revision (17).

"traits of ethnographic inquiry that make it appropriate to the study of writing instruction": "contextuality, participant observation, multiple perspectives, hypothesis-generating, and meaning-making (see also Kantor, Kirby, & Goetz, 1981)(72). contextuality = "thick description" of the "specific classroom situations" under observation; will assignment sheets or CFPs & writers' descriptions of their situation/position suffice? Xparticipant observationX (i don't want to watch them write, i want to hear how they talk about their writing. so i guess if i'm participating in conversations w/them about their writing, & recording the conversation that kinda counts, but it seems pretty thoroughly… compromised? as if there should be some level of remove/sterility there that such a one-on-one encounter can't possibly afford. "multiple perspectives" = "ethnographers also seek to confirm, question, or add to their judgments by eliciting the judgments of others (73). this corraboration may be achieved by having more than one researcher in the setting, by teaming investigator and participant (Smith & Geoffrey, 1968), or by using key informant interviews (Jackson, 1968)." do one-on-one interview conversations count as "teaming"? somehow i doubt it…"hypothesis generating" = "an open, eclectic stance on the part of researchers, who attempt to generate rather than test theories. they view emerging patterns with a skeptical eye until they have opportunities to reexamine and reevaluate these patterns. at the same time they may shape, alter, or refine their investigations as they proceed"; "ethnographers generally enter settings with assumptions and predispositions, but maintain their options until the weight of evidence determines particular directions." meaning making = "ultimately ethnographers are concerned with the ways in which individuals construct meanings for themselves, especially as members within a social or cultural group" (74-5).

examples of one researcher's open-ended interview questions (composing process study):
1. What did the instructor say about your previous paper?
2. What did you consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of this piece?
3. How does this paper compare in terms of quality with your previous work?
4. What major changes have you made in revising it? Why have you made these changes?
5. Are there other changes you want to make? What are they?
6. Could you tell me how you went about writing this paper? (133)

"Writing in a Nonacademic Setting" 225-258.
Lee Odell & Dixie Goswami's study's structure includes initial interviews & follow-up interviews a few months later; before the each "data-gathering interview" "we asked each worker to keep copies of all the writing he or she did during a two-week period" that was collected & examined by the researchers, & from which unique "interview sheets based on writing we had collected from [each] participant[]" were prepared; for each piece of writing "we would identify from four to six choices" writers had made, & for each write down what the writer had chosen followed by several alternative approaches to the particular writing situation, so that during interviews they could discuss with participants why each had made the choices they had as opposed to other possibilities, & whether they would be willing to switch w/in the context of their writing, & why (workplace scenarios & genre-appropriate expectations, etc.) (237-8).

reducing anxiety involves many repeated assurances (a) that different choices were all "correct," (b) that the interviewee was the expert on making choices appropriate to his/her writing situation, (c) that researchers' interest was solely in writers' reasoning regarding their choices, + lots of careful wording: "early in the interviewing process we became concerned that the form of our questions, even our tone of voice, might influence a worker's response. it is, for example, surprisingly easy to say 'why didn't you do y rather than x?' in a tone of voice which implies that y is the only acceptable alternative. there is also a danger of paraphrasing a worker's comments in such a way that they fit neatly with the interviewer's expectations: 'oh, so what you're saying is that you were very concerned with your audience at this point.' inevitably, of course, the very presence of an observer has some influence on the phenomena being observed. but we tried to establish procedures that did not imply our values and that let us make our interviews as nondirective as possible. for example, after a worker responded to our initial question, 'would you be willing…,' he or she often paused. we would remain silent for a few seconds and allow the worker to elaborate. if no elaboration was forthcoming, we would begin a sentence with the words 'so what you're saying here is…' and then pause, allowing the worker time to complete the sentence. if the worker did not do so, we would either say 'i'm not sure i understand,' ask the worker 'could you elaborate?' or paraphrase the worker's comment as closely as possible and give him or her a chance to modify our statement" (238-9).

data-coding & analysis: interview transcripts & categorizing responses ("guided in part by our reading and rereading of interview transcripts and in part by assumptions from rhetoric and current theories about the purposes or functions of discourse"—chosen categories were "audience-based reasons, writer-based reasons, and subject-based reasons," based on "distinctions made by Gibson (1969), Kinneavy (1971), and Halliday (1973)"—but not "the functions of complete pieces of discourse" a la Kinneavy; rather they're "types of reasons given to justify several specific choices in any given text. discussion of a single text—indeed even discussion of a single choice—might elicit more than one type of reason" identified audience-based reasons included status, personal knowledge or relationship w/audience, personal characteristics, & "anticipated or desired action on the part of the audience"; writer-based reasons inc. "writer's role or position in the organization," "ethos or attitude the writer wishes to project or avoid," "writers feelings about subject or task at hand"; subject-based reasons inc. importance of topic, "desire to provide an accurate, complete, nonredundant account," or desire to make a point (241-2).

Posted by ttobryan at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)