Cinnabar and Alabaster

January 10, 2006

hallidayan (genre 27/25)

Halliday, Michael A. K. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold, 1978.

1 sentence summary sociolinguistics is at the root of everything, at least in so far as the acquisition of language and learning of social communication skills are concerned.

passages
4. "in real life, most sentences that are uttered are not uttered for the first time. a great deal of discourse is more or less routinized; we tell the same stories and express the same opinions over and over again. we do, of course, create new sentences....but it really does not matter whether we do this or not; what matters is that we all the time exchange meanings, and the exchange of meanings is a creative process in which language is one symbolic resource--perhaps the principle one we have, but still one among others....language is as it is because of the functions it has evolved to serve in people's lives; it is to be expected that linguistic structures could be understood in functional terms. but in order to understand them in this way we have to proceed from the outside inwards, interpreting language by reference to its place in the social process."
28. "we do not experience language in isolation--if we did we would not recognize it as language--but always in relation to a scenario, some background of persons and actions and events from which the things which are said derive their meaning"
29. "it is important to qualify the notion of 'situation' by adding the word 'relevant.' the 'context of situation' does not refer to all the bits and pieces of the material environment....it refers to those features which are relevant to the speech that is taking place"
31. register = "what is actually taking place" + "who is taking part" + "what part the langauge is playing" = "the range within which meanings are selected and the forms which are used for their expression"
32. "the fact that the language we speak or write varies according to the type of situation...is no more than stating the obvious. that the theory of register does is to attempt to uncover the general principles which govern this variation, so that we can begin to understand what situational factors determine what linguistic features"
35. simply, the difference is this: "dialect...= variety 'according to the user'" & "register...= variety 'according to the use'"
61. "from a sociolinguistic standpoint, a text is meaningful not so much because the hearer does not know what the speaker is going to say, as in a mathematical model of communication, but because he does know. he has abundant evidence, both from his knowledge of the general (including statistical) properties of the linguistic system and from his sensibility to the particular cultural, situational and verbal context; and this enables him to make informed guesses about the meanings that are coming his way."
145. "the various genres of discourse, including literary genres, are the specific semiotic functions of a text that have social value in the culture. a genre may have implications for other components of meaning: there are often associations between a particular genre and particular semantic features of an ideational or interpersonal kind, for example between the genre of prayer and certain selections in the mood system. hence labels for generic categories are often functionally complex"

Posted by ttobryan at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)

verbing weirds genre (genre 26/25)

Coe, Richard M., Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko. The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002.

1 sentence summary genre (from several theoretical positions) gives us a way to talk about ideology & rhetoric, an angle by which to examine the intersections of workplace agendas & actors' efforts to meet/change them, the workings of political utterance exchange.

charles bazerman
14. "the places you habituate will develop those parts of you that are most related to and oriented towards the activities of that space. as our grandmothers warned, if you hang around the race track long enough, you become one of those race track characters"; "when you start writing in those genres you begin thinking in actively productive ways that result in the utterances that belong in that form of life and you take on all the feelings, hopes, uncertainties, and anxieties about becoming a visible presence in that world and participating in the available activities. you develop and become committed to the identity you are carving out within that domain….in these ways genre shapes intentions, motives, expectations, attention, perception, affect, and interpretive frame. it brings to bear in the local moment more generally available ideas, knowledge, institutions, and structures that we recognize as germane to the activity of the genre.

anthony paré
57. what is it good for? "by enlarging the focus of attention in rhetorical inquiry to include the full social and symbolic action of textual practice, the reconception of genre encourages us to consider the complex interconnections among these once-separated aspects of writing." 58. fairclough on "the naturalization of ideology": "a particular set of discourse conventions…implicitly embodies certain ideologies—particular knowledge and beleifs, particular 'positions' for the types of social subject that participate in that practice…and particular relationships between categories of participants" (94)
59. in coe's words "genre embody attitudes"; pêcheux says "in the process of acquiring the ways of talking which are normatively associated with a [particular] subject position, one necessarily acquires also its ways of seeing, or ideological norms" (39).
61. "genre's illusion of normalcy may be cracked or exposed at certain moments: when an event occurs that does not match the anticipated, socially constructed exigence to which the genre responds; or, in a related situation, when the genre is stretched too wide, and its forms and actions are inappropriate or ill-suited to the occasion…; when newcomers first begin to participate in a genre and find it 'unnatural' or counter to their own discourse habits and aims…; when there are shifts in power relations within institutions, so that the values produced by discourse practices no longer favor those with authority to change or influence those practices"
64. "a discourse, says gee, is an 'identity kit' (p. 127)"

catherine schryer
76. "when we address the issue of genre and power, we also need to explore a genre's relationship to time and space. in particular, we need to examine the possibilities for human action that exist within specific chronotypes….one of the purposes of genre research, then, should be to catch a glimpse of the 'chronotopic unconscious' or 'set of unspoken assumptions about space and time that are so fundamental that they lie even deeper…than the prejudices imposed by ideology' (holquist, 1990, p. 142)."
77. bourdieu & "habitus," a "set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways. the dispositions generate practices, perceptions and attitudes which are 'regular' without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any rule" (12)
84. in sum: "from bourdieu's perspective, then, genres can be seen as constellations of regulated, improvisational strategies triggered by the interaction between individual socialization or 'habitus' and an organization or 'field.'"
85. "each genre…has a different trajectory, a different potential for producing world views and representing human agency….[genres] function as discourse formations or constellations of strategies that instantiate a 'commonsense' understanding of time and space that can affect their writers or readers. we can become habituated to these constellations of resources and fail to see the possibilities for the constraints on human action that they enact."
95. "when we examine genres as trajectory entities or flexible constellations of improvisational yet regulated strategies that agents enact within fields it is probably useful to think of genres as actions or verbs….we genre all the time in the sense that we classify possible sets of paradigmatic choices," and "at the level of individual human agents, we are genred all the time. we are socialized through genres and acquire our linguistic capital through our exposure to various genres….they create gnoseological systems—systems where commonsense visions of time/space and the possibility of human action exist. consequently, they are profoundly ideological"

joanne yates & wanda orlikowski
108-10. chronos & kairos: "chronos is generally understood as measureably, quantitative time" (the physical moment) and "kairos is understood as the rhetorical opportunity associated with a particular, objectively definable situational context" (the opportunities the moment affords): "kairotic coordination can be seen both to emerge from participants' enactment of a genre system and to shape that enactment as participants situate the communicative action within a particular time and place. chronological time serves as one resource upon which participants may draw in focusing other participants' attention and thus coordinating their communicative activities"

peter medway
141. "perhaps the notion of genre needs to be fuzzy. perhaps there are degrees of genreness, from tightly defined (or ossified…) to baggy and indeterminate"
149. genres don't "exist in a structuralist space of mutually exclusive options from which we have to make definite choices. rather, our utterances are intelligble, have meaning and are social actions because they are situated always with reference to a genre, or, very commonly, to more than one. others can understand us—we can understand ourselves—because we recognize as familiar the sort of thing that is being done. some genres are as much constellations of possible relations to other genres as definite and hard-edged entities"

lorelei lingard & richard haber, m.d.
168. "when situated and accurate, explicit teaching can help cultivate in students a meta-awareness of the oral presentation genre, and this meta-awareness may encourage students towards educators' goal of efficient, effective communication of relevant medical data. students may not be protected from erroneous judgments (of both the structural and attitudinal sort) by this meta-awareness, but they may be empowered by an increased control of their presentations, their interpretation of feedback, and their revisions"

janet giltrow
195. defines meta-genres as: "atmospheres of wordings and activities, demonstrated precedents or sequestered expectations—atmospheres surrounding genres. like genres themselves, meta-genres are indexed to their context of use: every activity—or discipline—having its own relation to and life in language, and meta-genres representing or advancing these relations, positioning genres in relation to other activities."
196. & what is this good for? "the concept of meta-genre can help us attend to the kind and quantity of information a context transmits to writers and readers, we could also come to recognize that meta-genres—like genres themselves—are situated expressions, motivated by their contexts of use"
199. also, potentially, "the history of a meta-genre itself—its timing in the schedule of the ganre's career, its changes over time—could be read to discriminate among rhetorical situations"
201. "a meta-genre that occludes or tactfully or timidly evades, or naturalizes highly contingent practices, may not be bad in itself, but, rather, a sign of unspoken negotiations among conflicting interests, a way of everybody getting on and going on despite hunches and suspicions. but a meta-genre that is contradictory may be a sign of troubles."

peter knapp
283. "for hjelmslev, content is formed through an encounter of substance with expression"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2006

kinda like hydras (genre 25.3/25)

Bizzell, Patricia. "Hybrid Academic Discourses: What, Why, How." Composition Studies 27:2. (1999) 7-22.

1 sentence summary changing populations have addressed the situations of academic text-production in new ways, producing scholarship that does equally rigorous--but different--work; students should not only see these forms but be encouraged to experiment themselves.

passages
7. accounting for the dialogic nature of scholarship: "it is important to remember" that the discourse community definition working w/bartholomae's position in "inventing" was "defined against work that labeled struggling academic writers as linguistically and cognitively deficient"
8. now, "almost twenty years" later, "defining 'academic discourse' is a more complex task...which concomitantly complicates the pedagogical strategies needed to teach it....traditional academic discourse....still has many adherents, and students will encounter its hidebound proponents in more than one college class. but in many, many academic disciplines today, traditional academic discourse must share the field with new forms of discourse that are clearly doing serious intellectual work and are received and evaluated as such, even as they violate many of the conventions of traditional academic discourse"--these are what she calls "'hybrid' academic discourses"
11. "these new discourses are still 'academic,' in that they are doing the intellectual work of the academy--rigous, reflective scholarship....but they have combined elements of traditional academic discourses with elements of other ways of using language that are more comfortable for the new academics." and "perhaps these new discourses are gaining ground, too, because they enable new kinds of intellectual work."
12. some of the scholars exemplifying these hybrids: mike rose in lives on the boundary, helen fox's listening to the world, keith gilyard's voices of the self, and villanueava's bootstraps, which she particularly examines here.
13-14. differences from the academic standard of old: "the grapholect issue" (12), "personal experience, which is absolutely taboo in traditional academic discourse, may be used in hybrid forms to add peruasive force to a point by invoking an emotional response from the reader," "'offhand refutation'" wherein "a casual critical remark" is used rather than "a rigorous frontal assault on an opposed scholarly position"
15. others include the "free use of humor" & in some "form[s] of English other than American," "a stylistic preference for indirection" which some students explain "they intend to show respect for the reader's powers of inference...as well as to tantalize the reader into reading on"
16. the thing to remember: "these traits describe writing that does serious intellectual work--just not in the way favored by traditional american academic discourse"
17. bizzell suggests a "thought experiment"--that teachers practice writing such a hybrid--including personal experience in writing about a scholarly influence & imagining a scholarly audience. for teaching, she says, "i do not recommend taking into class a taxonomy of hybrid discourses...and requiring your students to produce texts that conform to it. that can hardly be done even with long-established, traditional, and exhaustively analysed academic genres....rather, it seems to me that what we have to do is to create conditions in which students are encouraged to experiment with their own forms of hybrid discourse."

& as an aside--talk about personifying the text as the author's human offspring in really creepy ways--> "i like to encourage students to cannibalize earlier papers for parts to use in later papers" (20). there's nothing wrong w/the idea at all, of course, but the metaphor's a little violent!

Posted by ttobryan at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)

a qualified 'no' (genre 25.2/25)

Freedman, Aviva. "Show and Tell? The Role of Explicit Teaching in the Learning of New Genres." Research in the Teaching of English. 27 (1993): 222-51.

1 sentence summary explicit teaching of new genres, while in some instances partially beneficial, is in general difficult if not impossible & shows little correlation, in most cases, to students' acquisition of new genres.

passages
224. "what role, if any, can or should the explicit teaching of genre features play in learning to write new genres? to be more precise, the question can be subdivided as follows:
is explicit teaching necessary?
is explicit teaching possible?
if so, can it be useful?
if so, when, at what stage in the evolution of a writer?
...and, at what stage in the evolution of the writing?
...and, by whom; that is, what knowledge is necessary for the would-be intervener?
and as a counterpoint throughout, we need to remember the implicit negative questions:
can explicit teaching be harmful?
if so, when, and by whom?"
229. a studied group of law students learned to write field-appropriate generic texts: "the students consulted no models," "students were given no explicit instruction," and "the students themselves made no attempt to formulate the rules underlying the genre as they struggled with their writing tasks"--thus explicit teaching is not necessary; students can & do learn without it.
231. (thus/also) "genre knowledge is tacit"--but "the words 'subconscious' and 'unaware' have unfortunate connotations, suggesting as they do either mysterious freudian powers or simple lack of attention. neither meaning is intended"
232. "explicit teaching and conscious learning are not possible except for a limited number of features" for 3 main reasons: "the rules of our language have not yet been described adequately even by the most sophisticated linguists" so how could we teach them w/o knowing them? "the rules that are known are simply too complex and too numerous to be explicitly taught in the context of writing or language instruction (as opposed to courses devoted to linguistics or discourse theory)" & "the number of rules that can be applied in language production by the learner is very limited"--while working to enunciate context, we can only hold a few overt structural rules in mind anyway, so learning a lot of them wouldn't do us any good.
237. so what's left for teachers to teach? "transparent features of form" & "composing strategies," plus "teachers have a central role to play in setting up facilitative environments."
238. of course, exposure alone won't do it either: "there is a probably a threshhold level of exposure: after that point, more reading is not going to make for better writing" and anyway "exposure to written discourse is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. reading alone is not enough, just as exposure to comprehensible input in a second language is not enough by itself to ensure acquision."
241. so, in general, based on specific case-studies, "explicit guidance is not necessary. however, we cannot exclude the possibility that explicit guidance of some kind might have enhanced or accelerated the learning." then again:
245. "at the same time, explicit teaching may be dangerous: if the instructor is an outsider, or alternatively is an insider, with inaccurate representations of the genre; or for those students who are likely to overgeneralize; or place focal, rather than subsidiary, attention...on formal features rather than on meaning.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:42 PM | Comments (0)

crafting rhetoric (genre 25.1/25)

Fahnestock, Jeanne. "Genre and Rhetorical Craft." Research in the Teaching of English 27:3 (1993): 265-71.

1 sentence summary aviva freedman defines genres too unclearly in her arguments against (much) explicit instruction, leaving their place relative to rhetoric uncertain; in rhetoric, some elements of genre have always been explicitly taught & should continue to be so.

265. important questions: "what level of specificity is required in the description of genre for teaching purposes? would it have to include all the details of language production in all the possible sentences?....if we decalre that all the adequate description of a genre means a hierarchically-ordered set of several hundred rules, like a computer program with embedded subroutines, we could certainly declare explicit teaching of any genre impossible."
266. of course, "at too abstract a level of description, genre distinctions could be as useless to teach at too precise a level of description"
267. miller's hierarchies make more sense to her than freedman's ways of describing the stuff; and then there's history, wherein "to freedman's questions about whether the explicit teaching of genre is necessary, possible, or useful, the practice of centuries would answer 'yes,' 'yes,' and 'yes.'"
268. "a comparison of the teaching of writing to the teaching of a craft" in freedman's presentation includes an "assertion that any craft is ever taught without a conscious awareness of technique"--jf disagrees: "freedman seems to imagine a silent blacksmith who passes on tactile knowledge to a watching apprentice without ever verbalizing a rationale for what is going on; nothing conscious need even occur in either head, master or pupil....there is tactile knowledge, yes, but there is also an overwhelming body of transmitted verbal explanation and systam. there is no craft or 'art' without an explication of its principles so that they can be applied across situations"
270. "many of the strategies [explicitly] taught are revivals of features in the classical rhetorical curriculum: the enthymeme, the picheireme revived in the toulmin model, the stases, and the common topics....it would be difficult to isolate these concepts from the setting in which they are taught, a setting that always includes the analysis of models, 'pushed output,' and the close mentoring of students--in short, all the devices of good pedagogy that freedman applauds. to test the efficacy of instruction in techne versus no instruction in techne, we would need a class of wolf children."

(okay, so maybe i just included that last bit because i love anybody who writes serious scholarly sentences about wolf-children.)

Posted by ttobryan at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

December 31, 2005

simple necessities (genre 24.3/25)

Slevin, James F. "Genre Theory, Academic Discourse, and Writing within the Disciplines." Audits of Meaning. Ed. Louise Z. Smith. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1988. 3-16.

1 sentence summary: teaching students to be aware of genres both enables them to master specific genres and enables them to flexibly interact with new genres as they work within the real disciplinary & extra-academic situations where discourse--not only or always academic--operates.

framing questions (3-4):
"how are individual acts of producing and reading texts related to one another? how do genres, discursive institutions, make these relations possible? what values, beliefs, and ways of interpreting the world inhere in the discursive forms students practice and in the process of learning them? and what kind of critical awareness of these values and interpretive strategies do students need in order to produce and not just parody these forms?"

passages:
5. "a genre is an inherited social form, a 'discursive institution,' within which a writer fuses meaning, structure, linguistic features, and pragmatic purposes and effects. genres establish rhetorical situations, including relations of power between writer and audience. understanding them and their institutional contexts is thus indepsnesable to the teaching of writing"
11. writing across the curriculum = "general practices, common procedures for teaching writing that will work in all sorts of courses...generalizations about the writing process and cognitive growth"; writing within disciplines = "what would happen if we followed and alternative view of academic genres, one that is centered on the writer's active, contributing participation in an educational community?....what a political scientist, or historian, or philosopher discusses the writing she studies and teaches...and the scholarly and student writing which intends to say something convinceinly about those texts, what does she mean by writing and how are these various texts related to one another?"
14. "neither...understanding [nor] transcending constraints...can ever be attained only from interpreting texts, no matter how attentive that interpretation might be to larger concerns. such constraints must be experienced and reflected upon from within one's own writing, which requires that student writing be an integral and equal part of any course....without this attention to writing, post-structuralist educational goals will do little more than reproduce (in different ideological form, at best; at worst merely with different ideological terms) the formulaic interpretive ingenuity that marks the educational agenda it critiques"
15. geertz on "the refiguration of social thought": "this genre blurring...[philosophical inquiries looking like literacy criticism...scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux...histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony....has grown to the point where it is becoming difficult either to label authors...or to classify works....it is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just another redrawing of the cultural map--the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes--but an alteration of the principles of mapping. something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (19-20)"
16. "so the critical study of academic genres, a study that questions them as well as masters them, indeed masters them by both writing within them and contextualizing them, is pedagogically necessary for two reasons: (1) this active, productive, writing-centered experience is consistent with how we really learn, as opposed to just absorbing what others give us, no matter how complex and sophisticated the gift; (2) students, to be prepared for the variety of expectations, and even the 'blurring' of expectations, they will encounter, need not so much to be told about and practice our understanding of academic genres (which might be wrong and will probably soon be ou tof date) as to participate in their making, examining critically, on their own, the nature of those genres and the generic basis for thinking, reading, and writing in the disciplines they engage."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2005

analogous (genre 25/25)

Fishclov, David. Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993.

1 sentence summary: the metaphors scholars use to describe (literary) genres limit & allow their interpretation & thus how critics use them to know/make sense of texts; understanding genre through any/all of these, pluralistically, is a good approach to seeing how (in different ways) it works.

the major analogies (1-2):
1. biology (evolution)
2. families (trait-sharing & close or distant related-ness)
3. institutionality: "social institutions, like literary genres, provide a netowrk of normal through which our experience is made culturally meaningful"
4. speech-acts (a direct analogy, wherein genres are written "imitations or representations of speech acts"--but this doesn't work for all genres)

the overall argument is for "a pluralistic approach to genre theory.... a given theoretical model may be highly relevant to some kinds of genres, or to some aspects of their evolution, but only partially relevant or even totally irrelevant to other genres or other problems in the field. note that this pluralistic view is not a relativistic one, because not every conceptual analogy is relevant to the same degree (or even necessariily relevant at all) to genre theory"

his definition (8-10): genre is "a combination of prototypical, representative members, and a flexible set of constitutive rules that apply to some levels of literary texts, to some individual writers, usually to more than one literary period, and to more than one language or culture" <--this def should "distinguish genre from certain other types of groupings of literature" and "apply to all existing (and future) 'historical genres'" where "historical genre" means "they are transmitted through history," "are concrete configurations of texts in specific periods and literatures," and "they actually shape how writers produce, and readers respond to,literary works."

11. "there are no stable paradigms of genres, because if the critic's purposes shift, so do his 'generic' groupings of works"
12. "in every generic category we witness an intimate, hermeneutical relation between paradigmatic instances and the associated rules: generic rules are drawn from, and exemplified by, those representative cases. to cut this gordian knot connecting prototypical members and the associated generic rules would result either in disregarding the stable, paradigmatic instances, or else in denying that authors and readers (consciously or unconsciously) draw from those instances a flexible set of generic rules"
15. "although i do not propose to determine how many authors should write within a generic framework, there is no doubt that a genre cannot remain an individual endeavor. no matter how important a specific writer is in a given generic tradition, he is always only a part of that tradition."
17. "in...cases where the very channels of intercultural and interlingual communication are blocked, the generic system will remain confined within its linguistic boundaries. however, this situation in its pure form seems to be the exception in literary history; interlingual and intercultural contacts are the noem. where such contacts occur, literary genres commonly migrate across the borders and establish 'colonies' in neighboring countries or languages"
89. an important note about convention: "it does not entail...any actual conformity to the convention. in other words, a convention is not primarily based on statistical grounds; people may rebel against prevailing conventions or ignore them, yet we can still speak of those prevailing conventions as long as people believe that some specific 'oughtness' is part of the cultural scene in which they operate."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2005

community means (genre 24.2/25)

Miller, Carol. "Rhetoric and Community: The Problem of the One and the Many." Defining the New Rhetorics Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. London :Sage, 1993.

1 sentence summary: "community" is a difficult term in modern rhetorical studies, one that butts up against competing theoretical frames in potentially problematic ways; rather than presenting an insurmountable problem for rhetoric, however, it can be understood as a theoretical problem to which rhetoric offers--is--the solution.

passages:
80. the "problem of the one and the many" are still "relevant today, capturing for us the elusive goal at the center of a series of troubling issues, political cultural, theoretical, pedagogical....should community standards prevail over freedom of expression in matters of obscenity or nudity? can we claim that a single language, a single cultural tradition, ought to form the basis of public education? what standards and goals should prevail in higher education--those of disciplinary authority, those of students' 'home communities,' those of the capitalist-industrial community of which those students want to become members?"; main claim: "rhetoric should take seriously its social grounding by exploring and using the concept of community more fully and more critically"
81. "plato rejected rhetoric as inevitable demogoguery because it is grounded in community: rhetoric can only say what an audience already knows or wants to hear; rhetoric panders, manipulates, deceives"; community--esp. "discourse community"--has become important in comp: "in social constructionism, the 'one' and the 'many' are complicated and interdependent: individuals are constructed in important ways by the social milieu in which they develop, and knowledge concepts, even 'reality,' are all seen as distinctively social products"
83. bitzer defines community alongside public: "as a communiy, a public must be maintained by the arts of communication and must have a fund of common, or public, knowledge that it authorizes"--he questions whether such a public exists today when rhetoric has such "vicious circularity"--"good" is what the authorities say it is & tell us to believe it is: "a good reason is a reason that will be accepted as a good reason."
87. the problem w/rhetoric & liberalism: "liberalism promotes anomie and disaffection and ultimately the conviction that reasoned argument is not possible, because each individual is entitled to his or her own conception of the good, incommensurable by definition with everybody else's." (in walter's words, on 88, it is "a self-subverting doctrine" (15) because it "distains its own traditions" (14))
89. modern & postmodern pluralism are not the same; in the latter neither "individuals or communities can be unities" as both are "inherently full of conflict"
90. metaphors for this pluralism include young's model of "city life" as "the being together of strangers": "in living together, city dwellers have 'some common problems and common interests, but they do not create a community of shared final ends, of mutual identification and reciprocity' (238)"; others are mouffe's definition of "radical democracy" and corlett's "politics of extravagance"
91. miller's suggestion: "perhaps we should seek a rhetoric of play, of experiment, of advocacy that is both tentative and committed, of dialogic agonism that is exploratory and possessive"--the danger is that "postmodernism may leave us with a community that is so fragmented, perforated, intermittent, and attenuated that it no longer performs any rhetorical work....but...a rhetoric that does without community will be impoverished--certainly it will be neither fully social or political" & so the tightrope must be walked: "the problem of the one and the many has a rhetorical solution. the task of a new political rhetoric will be to construct one out of many, over and over again."

Posted by ttobryan at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2005

samantha's books (genre 24.1/25)

Himley, Margaret. "Genre as Generative." The Structure of Written Communication: Studies in Reciprocity between Writers and Readers. ed. Martin Nystrand. Orlando: Academic P. 1986.

1 sentence summary: the writing of a young child just learning about writing's visual and purposeful elements learns because of and within the structures of assigned and example-genres; her awareness of a situation's expectations determine what she writes more than what she "wants to say" does.

passages
defining genre loosely & then zooming in on miller's "social action" definition, she claims:
139. "as a child comes to appropriate and rework a genre (to 'own' it, in bakhtin's [1981] sense), she comes to learn not only the typical substance or formal features associated with the discourse but also--and surely more fundamentally--the situations that typically give rise to the genre, the social action she may accomplish with it, and the social and interpretive roles she may adopt with it. indeed, what a child learns is a new way of acting and making meaning"; when we learn new genres, "we discover new ways to mean and thus how to participate more fully in the actions of the community"
142. the young writer's "interpretation of 'book' at any moment in her development as a writer...defines those text points that are salient and then, in turn, appropriate text options. her notion of the genre--of the social and interpretive roles entailed in that genre--establishes a kind of overall meaning potential"--what she thinks "book" means "defines a series of choice points for samantha to identify and respond to. in a sense, then, the genre itself--or more precisely her interpretation of it--generates a kind of momentum that draws samantha forward as she composes, and that may encourage, perhaps even enable her to discover and invent new text-creating options"
146. clearly, in her early "books," "it appears that samantha's purpose primarily is to act like a student and to fulfill a class assignment--and to do so within her understanding of the Draw and Write genre"
150. when in one example the text she generates is too short, "not meeting the genre requirement of three lines--a requirement that draws the writer forward. driven by the syntactic-semantic momentum of the first part, samantha 'invents'" words to fill the lines; "neither her teacher nor her mother can explain the reference to violet day. when i asked samantha herself, she grinned sheepishly and merely shrugged. in a sense, it is the genre, not samantha, speaking."
154. in samantha's easter-bunny letter she follows "the formal structure of a letter. the tone is formal and polite, and all the extra periods and attempts at cursive suggest how samantha seeks to use all appropriate written language conventions. after all, she has an important audience, the easter bunny--who she truly believes is real--and an important statement to make"--rather than an artificial assignments, she's speaking to someone, and for a reason.
156. "for samantha, the effect of genre is clearly generative. her notion of how a particular genre works--the social role the writer adopts, the interpretive act she performs, the situations that give rise to the genre, the discourse features--defines for her a series of textual choice points which she negotiates as she creates text....she moves from texts that 'look like' certain genres to texts that 'say something' and then to texts that mean solely within the resources of written language. this growth is facilitated by her evolving notions of genre. to experiment with a genre is a way to create new situations, to learn new ways to make meaning and to interpret events and to be. in a sense, genre is like the hub of a wheel, related to and bringing together the several aspects of writing."

Posted by ttobryan at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)

December 17, 2005

exemplary (genre 23.3/25)

Hamilton, Margaret. "Genre Theory, Chaim Perelman, and Bioterrorism Responses: A Rhetorical Analysis." American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology 2002 Annual Preconference. New Orleans: NCA. 2002. 8 Dec. 2005

1 sentence summary using genre theory alongside perelman's definitions of rhetorical elements allows a productive analysis of a group of texts that highlights the way their textual attributes reflect differences in their communicative media, communicative purposes, and intended audiences.

passages
par 3. each of the 4 docuents examined differs from the others in "content and tone," which hamilton suggests is "because each represents a different communication genre" using different media to convey the same general message to a different audience for a different reason, or with a different expectation toward that audience's needs or expectations. from alan gross: "in scientific writing, arrangement functions epistemologically, while style functions ontologically" and it's likely not just true of science; "looking at [each of these documents] in terms of genres based on their function...is one way to begin to understand something about their epistemology and ontology."
par 7. from berkenkotter & huckin, the "five principles of genre theory: dynamism...situatedness...form and content (including a 'sense of what content is appropriate' to a particular situation), duality of structure (applying genre rules simultaneously constitutes and reproduces the genre) and community ownership (genres reflect community norms, epistemology, ideology, etc.)(4)"
par 9. "a genre exists only within a context, even as genres construct context" & most (not all) of her examples were (in varying ways) constructed for/constructed by the context of "government"
par 12-3. each text begins "with a display of signifiers that demonstrate[s] their credibility in relation to the topic"--"what chaim perelman and lucie olbrechts-tyteca (1969) refer to as 'argument[s] from authority'"; "timing also plays a significant role in each of these documents"
--then she goes on to detail differences in purpose/audience & how textual features & rhetorical bents--inc. the presence of absence of epideictic language, and the presence or absence of the name of an identifying author (an authorless document from a goverment agency has more authority for being authorless; the idea conveyed is that the entire organization owns & supports the words, rather than that they're the words of any particular (potentially fallible) writer)--reveal them in each document. i kept taking this off my list & finally put it back on because it's so pragmatically useful--it's one of the few demonstrations i have of people taking genre theory and doing something with it, using it not only to talk about text but to learn something concrete about individual texts--& the fact that its subject is popular & governmental publications about a topic having nothing at all to do with education or rhetoric, which shows how wide-flung its applicability can be--makes it all the more useful as a model/example of why this stuff is good.

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chronos (not kairos) (genre 23.2/25)

Keunen, Bart. "Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory Schemata" CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal. June 2002. Purdue UP. 8 Dec. 2005.

1 sentence summary what bakhtin refered to as "chronotopes" are categories of expectation readers bring to textual experiences that participate in the formation of genres as readers experience and understand them.

passages
par 1. "chronotopes are not only semantic elements of texts; they are also (and in the first place) cognitive strategies applied by specific readers and writers....bakhtin intends to conceive literature as a dialogue between (mutually interacting) texts...and the prior knowledge of readers and writers....this interaction between texts and mental procedures can be conceptualized in terms of invariant structures within literary communication--chronotopes--which are cognitive invariants used by writers and readers in order to structure historically and textually divergent semantic elements"
par 7. "bahktin extends the genre theory found in the earliest writings of the bahktin circle by defining generic devices as chronotopic structures: genres are seen as founded on a complex of temporal and spatial markers which dominate a specific class of texts"; "chronotopes...are not purely formal phenomena but mental constructions that take shape in the pragmatic interaction with texts. although time and space are embedded in texts, they do not unite until they enter the minds of concrete writers and readers" which understanding can shift "the emphasis of critical analysis" of texts away from "narrative action" to "the chronotopic constructions that writers and readers associate with the text"
par 15. looking at "chronotopes as fictional world models" happens at 2 (ambiguously entertwined) levels: "language-knowledge and world-knowledge"; although bahktin seems to see them primarily as "schematic structures belonging to the field of world knowledge[,] they are in fact a kind of 'action schemata'"
16. what bahktin calls "motifs" = "textual triggers" & "chronotopes" = "memory schemata": "thus, the motif of meeting with the beloved (a feature of the adventure novel) can be seen as a trigger activiating an action schema (the reader's prior knowledge of love affairs)."

Posted by ttobryan at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

tribal initiation rites (genre 23.1/25)

Freedman, Aviva. "Reconceiving Genre." Texte 9:9 (1990): 279-292.

1 sentence summary genre study extends the possibilities of traditional textual analysis in multiple directions because genres aren't just the situated products of circumstance and intentions; it is through genres & generic conventionality that we're initiated into (disciplinary and other) communities and cultures.

passages
287. genre study extends traditional textual analysis by asking questions like: "how does place affect the meaning of the text? do these textual regularities derive from some common social action? how does the hierarchic fusion of form and substance accomplish this social purpose? if genres are best seen as texts in dialogue, how is this interaction maintained or created in these texts? in what sense is the genre a response to, or a product of cultural or institutional constraints? in what sense is the genre shaped by its discipline, its field of knowledge?"
288. the "functions of" the assignments the law students in her study produced were "signaled by their setting"; "on the most basic level, in writing these essays students were fulfilling an implicit institutional contract" for an "obligation [that] entailed a very specific kind of writing"; "the distinctive form of the law essays also contributes to their meaning, providing what miller calls 'meta-information.' the greater complexity of the syntax suggests an analysis of experience that is hierarchical in structure, specific propositions are seen in the context of others, and relationships of cause, effect, condition, and especially concession are highlighted." field's ontology is revealed by its generic expectations
289. as they learn these practices, "the student writers begin to look at and interpret reality in certain prescribed ways"; "this then was the social action undertaken in their writing"
290. "their writing both attests to their entry into such a community and more significantly enabled or actualized that entry"; "the students' initiation into this new discourse community was accomplished collaboratively. the instructor as well as the teaching assistant played active roles in the interactions….the professor modeled both the lexicon as well as the persuasive strategies or lines of reasoning that are conventionally accepted as valid in the discipline…. in framing the assignments he specified the data to be analyzed and formulated the questions to be addressed, eliciting thus from the students the kind of thinking which ultimately found expression in their essays"; "in other words, the instructor, the teaching assistant, and the student were all active agents in a complex collaboration which resulted in the students' performance as members of a new discourse community"; "to view the interaction as an initiation rite is enlightening. writing is not elicited so that teachers can find out what students know: it is elicited so that students can thereby know things and do things that they could not and did not know or do before"
291. "for the students we observed, the recurrence was synchronic rather than diachronic—a fact which highlighted the creation of the genre as a social action in response to a communally interpreted disciplinary and cultural exigence. the inventive power of a genre is thus respored in consonance with the reinvention of rhetoric"

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put up or shut up (genre 22.3/25)

Bloom, Lynn Z. "Why Don't We Write What We Teach? And Publish it?" Journal of Advanced Composition 10:1 (1990): 87-100.

1 sentence (extracted) summary: "it is particularly important that teachers of advanced composition write and publish literary nonfiction" for the following simple reason: "if we don't practice what we preach and teach what we practice, what credibility, what authority can we claim?"

passages
90. gass on academic publishing: "articles are to be worn; they make up one's dossier the way uniforms make up a wardrobe, and it is not known—nor is it clear about uniforms either—whether the article has ever contained anything of lasting value"
91. "if we think like writers, we will teach like writers rather than as critics"; demonstrations of dillard's essay-writing and critic mary jane dickerson showing that those who do it don't talk about it in the ways teachers/critics do.
94. & publishing essays—even if they do do it, doesn't get them read by one's colleagues—bloom says "but i'd like to talk to my fellow teachers. i'd like to be able to pick up the journal of advanced composition or college composition and communication or rhetoric review and find in them belletristic essay of the kind that we talk about in class and use as exemplary models"—which would "validate this kind of writing as no other sort of acknowledgement could do"
96. she recounts a story of a student writer reading aloud an essay that he couldn't finish without crying, & finishes with "the rest of the class waited in respectful silence until our colleague had regained his composure" (she doesn't draw attention to it in any way, but she writes of her (graduate) student, who is also a writer as she is a writer, as a colleague)

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

hybrids! (genre 22.2/25)

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. "Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements." Quarterly Journal of Speech. 68 (May 1982):146-157.

1 sentence summary: "elements" of recognized genres often "overlap and combine in practice" in "productive but transitory" ways.

passages
146. "the concept of genre is an economical way of acknowledging the interdependence of purpose, lines of argument, stylistic choices, and requirements arising from the situation and the audience. genres are not only dynamic responses to circumstances; each is a dynamis--a potential fusion of elements that may be energized or actualized as a strategic response to a situation"
(& here's that talking-about-themselves-as-particular-configurations thing again: in the 3rd person Jamieson & Campbell write about "Campbell and Jamieson"—does that mean something different to them, or is it just a way of telling the reader how to find the piece?)
147. claims: "1) such fusion is rule goverened; and 2) identification of different generic elements and occasionally of whole genres within such acts allows the critic to understand how such acts work, and to predict their appearance"
150. addn'l characteristics: "fusions are not invariably successful" & "hybrids are called forth by complex situations and purposes and, as such, are transitory and situation-bound"
154-5. after an evaluation of a particular vice-presidential response to assuming the title under complex circumstances: "because the hybrid just analyzed occurs infrequently and under variable circumstances, the combination has not created strong audience expectations for speeches delivered by ascendent vice presidents or altered the expectations we bring to eulogistic occasions or rites of investiture"; 2 "possible exceptions to the principles governing organic fusions": "1) hybrids whose fusion is sustained by a recurrent situation, such as presidential inaugurals that combine constant epideictic elements" & "2)hybrids whose fusion is sustained by an institution such as the papacy, illustrated by encyclicals that fuse the elements of the apostolic letter with those of the roman imperial degree"
156. in case 2, "the longevity of the hybrid may make it difficult for us to perceive elements borrowed from different genres" (so @ that point what makes them hybrids & not new genres?) "the generic critic is constantly battling the inclination to minimize the idiosyncrasies and magnify the commonalities"
157. "generic analysis enables us to appreciate the idiosyncracies as well as the recurrent, to recognize the appropriate and sensitive response to a complex situation"; "the rhetorical hybrid represents a fusion of elements that, however transitory, stands as a potential kind of response to situations that future rhetors perceive in similar ways"; "without a generic perspective a critic would be less likely to perceive the recurrent elements as recurrent or the variable elements as an extension of the recurrent core"

Posted by ttobryan at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

nodes of influence (genre 22.1/25)

Jamieson, Kathleen M. "Antecedent Genre as Rhetorical Constraint." Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (Dec. 1975): 406-15.

1 sentence summary: when we create genres as responses to rhetorical situations, old genres influence our creations, creating pre-conceptions that limit our options.

project:
406. "in rhetorical transactions...the past may abide as a living presence"; "it is sometimes rhetorical genres and not rhetorical situations that are decisively formulaic"; "these discourses bear the chromosomal imprint of ancestral genres": "the contemporary papal encyclical to roman imperial documents and the apostolic epistles," "the early state of the union address to the 'king's speech' from the throne, and "essential elements of the early congressional replies to the parliamentary replies to the king"

conclusions:
414-5. (quoting herself) "perception of the proper response to an unprecedented rhetorical situation grows not merely from the situation but also from antecedent rhetorical forms"; "choice of an appropriate antecendent genre guides the rhetor toward a response consonant with situational demands"--and choosing an inappropriate one can result in non-working responses that need amendment; "rhetors do perceive unprecedented situations through antecedent genres...severe constraints are imposed on rhetor and audience once a generic antecedent is permitted to anchor response, and...the manacles of an inappropriate genre may be broken with varying degrees of difficulty." "antecedent genres are capable of imposing powerful constraints. the demonstrable existence of these constraints mandates the question, how free is the rhetor's choice from among the available means of persuasion?"; "to hold that 'the rhetor is personally responsible for his rhetoric regardless of "genres,"' is, at least in the cases examined here, to become mired in paradoxes"; "the question of the extent to which rhetorical response is determined by situation, audience expectations, antecedent rhetoric or other factors requires determined inquiry"

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

December 14, 2005

both/and (genre 21.3/25)

Threadgold, Terry. "The Genre Debate." Southern Review (Australia) 21:3 (1988): 315-30.

1 sentence summary: reid's collection, which this essay both reviews and engages with, presents varying conceptions of genre studies as participants in an artificial binary; in actuality the participants' theorizing is far more compatible than they seem to realize: genre, like reid's book, is characterized by both "stability and flexibility" rather than by a conflict between them.

meta
316. what threadgold is doing: "reviewing" the book, but also "what Anne Freadman...calls an 'uptake,' a dialogic and intertextual response" and also "what she calls a 'not-statement,' that is, the kind of strategic and rhetorical action which testifies to the reality of generic constraints at precisely the moment when it proves that so-called generic constraints are no strait-jacket"; this acknowledging move allows readers "to locate [her] text among the circulating system of contrasts and differences that constitute recognisable and socially ratified textual processes in the specific contexts in and for which [she writes and we] read: [she is] however both constrained by that necessity and free, once [she accepts] the challenge of the other text, to move in a number of only probabalistically predictable directions." thus, "the construction of this is [her] 'mixed genre,' which...can in no way be isolated from those ideological and emotional investments in certain intellectual positions and frameworks which are always a part of the inevitable coming together of the discourses of 'structure' and 'agency' in any form of social action that leads to the production of a text"
318. devil's advocacy to the book's main theories, for the sake of: an argument in poetics (1987) says "'genres' are constituted by cognitive phenomena: they are not feature sets abstracted from media products....what we naturalise as genres (textual patternings) are in effect only the effects of cognitive 'media schemata' which become 'mental' only by means of verbal processes...and are developed through interactive behaviors which construe realities by means of communication. such media schemata are socially consensual modes of referring to reality...which also construct and stablize reality"; the "object" of "theorizing about genres" should thus not be genres but should be "the genre concepts shared by agents in a media system in a given society" <--in such a theory, media (genre) is both text and matter of conveyance.
320-1. point #1: Q if there's so much research & attention on the social semiotic, "why are systemic linguists and 'hallidayans' and critics of other more general semiotic persuasions...still so hung up on the formal properties of genres as text-types?" & A b/c "consciousness is formed through social processes" & "it is by mastering semiotically mediated processes and categories in social interaction that human consciousness is formed in the individual"; "there is a systematic, probabilistic...relationship between generic situation types in a culture and the co-patterning of features in the text that social agents produce in those situation types"
322-3. "there is no question here of 'the genre school' constructing boundaries. the boundaries are already very clearly drawn, and they are drawn throughout the social and cultural order"; "in a poststructuralist enthusiasm with openness and the deconstruction of totalizing systems, with a happily euphoric conviction that the play of difference will ensure slippage, shifts of meaning, we need...to ask ourselves why then things change so slowly, why so many patterns of meaning...remain apparently impervious to change"
328-9. ultimately, "the text is full of talk of stability and flexibility"; "there are differences [between the positions framed as 'in debate'], but they are not in any sense incompatible with 'hallidayan' positions writ large. in fact, halliday himself has always argued that langauge is only one semiotic system among many and that in order to understand how we make meanings with it we have to understand how we make meanings with all the other semiotics with which language interacts."

Posted by ttobryan at 04:06 AM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2005

social semioticism (genre 21.2/25)

van Leeuwen, Theo, and Gunther Kress. "Toward a Social Theory of Genre." Southern Review (Australia) 21:3 (1988): 215-43

1 sentence summary: genre is social; genres are social; genres are constructed by social interaction & social demands; social interactions are constructed by social demands; social demands are played out textually in genres...

passages
215. "social semiotics...is crucially concerned with explicit accounts of language as text, of context, and of linguistic analysis within a socially based theory of language," with is not transparent.
216. w/halliday along, this becomes "a socio-semantic functional theory of material textual production"; acc. to halliday "language is...a meaning potential which has evolved to enable certain social functions"; "we need certain theoretical categories to describe...the interface between the socio-cultural world and textual form"; "we need to see lexico-grammatical patterns as multi-functional--realizing referential, ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings" & to "understand that these patterns realise these meanings because there is constant interaction between processes and agencies of textual production, the material nature of texts, and processes...by which texts are reproduced by receiving subjects," all "located in particular socio-historical structures"
216. definition: "genres are...the socially ratified text-types in a community, which make meaning possible by contextualising in a megagrammatical way (a way that tells us something about the grammar) the actual linguistic or semantic patterns that constitute the lexico-grammar of texts."
216. "it is through/in genres that...the things that carry ideologies of individuals and communities...are actually transmitted, maintained and potentially changed. it is genres that locate institutionally, valorise and shape the intertextual resources...that are the stuff of reality construction and change."
217. "the complex relations which compel us to construct a verbal text in relation to a supporting context...or to construct a sociohistorical context in relation to texts which support and require its construction...are in fact also always of the same order. the construction of texts as contexts, or of contexts as texts" happens by virtue of the same processes; "the relations between a situation-type and a text-type, and a text-type and its intertexts, are of the same kind...both situation-types and intertexts... are semiotic constructs"
219. from bahktin & derrida: "genre [is] a category that is potentially both reality-maintaining and reality-changing: both conservative in maintaining the status quo, and subversive in always presenting the possibility of challenging it."
238. "text as genre is therefore both the codification of a certain social state of affairs (the inertial element) and the domain of contestation and conflict (the processual/dynamic element)"; "the degree of power at issue in a particular interaction has a direct effect on the degree of fluidity possible in the interaction, and therefore in the genre. where power is strong, genres will be strictly policed and relatively rigid. where power is less, generic form is liable to greater flux"
240-1. Q & A (1): "where does this genre come from?" "a (new) genre is produced by making reference to and use of (fragments of) other genres, their social situations, social relations, and so on. this is possible precisely because the producer is located socially and linguistically in a particular place, is not 'just an individual' producing text out of nowhere, but is a social/linguistic subject with a particular experience of genres" (2) "is it central or marginal to the social inventory of generic types in this culture"? "every text carries the traces of many genres. what we call a genre therefore is usually and normally a particular configuration of such generic traces, a configuration which has, due to the social/cultural factors discussed above, a greater or lesser degree of structural and temporal stability and persistance....where there is high stability, multi-genericness over time and with use ceases to be focal or noticeable, becomes overlooked, redefined. the genre then seems coherent. where there is no such stability, the texts continue to exhibit their multi-generic character more obviously. such texts are marginal"
241. the big picture: "genre is one crucial category in the transmission of culture, ideology, the structurings of power, the formation of individual subjects, and the construction and transmission of hegemonic structures"

top 3: derrida, bahktin, halliday...

Posted by ttobryan at 09:36 PM | Comments (0)

clancy pondering (genre 21.1/25)

Ratliffe, Clancy. "Genre Theory, Genre Analysis, and Blog as a Genre." 12 Sept. 2003. Kairosnews: A Weblong for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. 2 Oct. 2003 http://kairosnews.org/node/view/3123

no sentence summary: thoughts about the potential of "genre analysis as a method for studying blogs" from aka. culturecat

Q & A: "why, when analyzing an Internet genre, one would [always] need a print referent"? "bakhtin's notion of intertextuality among utterances, todorov's remark that genres come '"[q]uite simply from other genres,"' and linell's idea of recontextualization" [is this a definitive answer? how/why do these observations create necessity?]

& also "i am still grappling with the problem of genre and subgenre, e.g., a poem is a genre and a sonnet is a subgenre; a blog is a genre and a warblog is a subgenre"

genre analysts don't all do it the same way--swales' choice is "to research the movement from situation to text, rather than from features of the text to communicative situation" but others reverse it, & "genre analysis, then, calls for a multi-methodological approach, especially if the researcher is studying the text and the communicative situation, or, as swales puts it, if the researcher is doing a 'textography'"

6 "methods one could use in genre analysis": "participant observation, corpus linguistics...discourse analysis, interviews, think-aloud protocol, and citation counts"

+ "methodological complexities": "do we give primary interpretive authority to the writer/speaker of the genre? the audience? the researcher? what about what is not said? how do you find that?"

& one more complication--for baktin utterances have beginnings & endings, but "in a blog post...an utterance, one might have one or several links to other blog posts or to articles in newspapers....those are, albeit by proxy, part of the utterance, and they disrupt an utterance's 'absolute beginning' and 'absolute end.'"

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quintilian told you so (genre 20.3/25)

Caudery, Tim. "Increasing Students' Awareness of Genre Through Text Transformation Exercises: An Old Classroom Activity Revisited." TESL-EJ 3:3 (1998) http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej11/a2.html

1 sentence summary: text transformation exercises, an old staple of writing & english courses, are particularly suited to teaching not only the salient features of occasional genres but also an awareness of genre--of the importance & interrelatedness of "audience, purpose, and medium" especially valuable to L2 learners.

passages
par. 3 "the ways in which texts can be seen to differ from or be similar to one another are extremely complex. biber...has used computer analysis of large corpora to demonstrate that different types of text vary from one another along numerous independent dimensions, creating a very large number of different text types. thus...we might find that 'formal' texts are marked by features such as frequent use of passive forms and nominalizations, and that 'informal' texts display frequent use of personal pronouns and contractions. however, there are genres in which texts typically display high levels of all these four features and others that display low levels of use of all of them." <--the terms are too broad

par. 5 "for any genre, a range of text types may be appropriate, but the range is far from infinite, and an error in setting the paramters in the multiple dimensions along which a text type may vary can result in the creation of an inappropriate text type"; example: in english beginning a letter "dear" is acceptable in a much broader array of contexts than beginning it "darling," but the words *mean* almost the same thing removed from genre-specific contexts.

par. 6 "failure to implement generic factors adequately may result in giving the impression to a reader that the writer is, perhaps, uneducated, weak, unenthusiastic, or deliberately insulting....this is precisely because the concept of genre is involved with factors such as writer/reader relationships and text purpose. a text that sends the wrong generic signals may...suggest that the writeris attempting to claim too close a relationship with the reader, or is being too distant. generic errors result in misinterpretation not so much of core meaning as of attitudes."

par. 8-10 if students need to excell at one particular genre, studying its features closely in isolation may be situationally good/necessary, but in general this is "of limited value" if not outright bad practice (agreeing w/freedman); (but in disagreement) "for improving general writing skills, teaching general principles on how genre-related factors relate to the internal features of a text is likely to be more effective than teaching specific features associated with individual genres."

par. 12 he favors a broader approach: "limiting reading to texts we think our students should be able to write at the present time is restricting. it is also important to realize that the genre of a text is recognizable not only by its internal features, but by the features of other genres that it does not have; genres are in part defined and identified contrastively."

par. 13 "we cannot expect students to be able to write texts of even just one or two genres successfully if they have never attempted to go beyond these to establish precisely where the boundaries lie between one genre and another. furthermore, not only is it interesting and enjoyable to experiment with other kinds of text than those one expects to write, but all such work increases awareness of the importance of the various factors related to genre"

par. 14 & 15--> "text transformation tasks" = not-necessarily linearly "(a) reading and understanding the source text, (b) noting the genre of the source text, including identification of the reader/writer relationship and text purpose, (c) noting the results of generic factors on the content, organization, and language of the source text, (d) identifying the genre of the new text, and deciding on how generic factors will affect content, organization and language of the new text, (e) selecting relevant material from the source text, and (f) using this material to write the new text, taking into account the decisions made about appropriate content, organization and language"

par. 18 (rationale): "this old teaching idea fits in perfectly with the modern interest in genre, since it makes explicit both differences between genres and the way that all texts are related to audience, purpose and medium"

benefits:
par. 19 requires "careful examination of a source text" for both meaning and features making it situationally suitable
par. 20 puts "a number of constraints" on students' writing, which both provides content that some students (esp. L2) struggle with & gets in the way of examining features & keeps "less ambitious students" from being "able to recycle language they can handle easily, without necessarily venturing into more challenging territory"
par. 22 "engages the entire class in solving the same communicative problem"--"the interest for students in seeing texts written by other members of the class lies in seeing not so much what other people said, but how theys said it"
par. 23 "a futher advantage of giving the same communicative problem for everyone to solve is that it makes collaborative writing in pairs, or even threes, much more practicable. occasional collaborative writing is interesting and potentially useful, in that it can get students to explain to each other their reasons for wanting to write something in a particular way[, which] will again increase awareness of what they are doing and the decisions they are making as they write." [so here "collaborative writing" really mean "collaborative learning" but in a writing context?]
par. 24 "writers are encouraged to move away from the lower order skills of knowledge telling and towards the higher order skills involved in knowledge transforming" (<--bereiter & scardamalia)
par. 25 "by focusing on the communicative factors associated with genre, students become more aware of writing as a process of problem solving. they learn what questions they have to ask themselves in order to create appropriate writing, and they begin to learn how to respond to the answers at which they arrive. in particular, they learn that there are many different ways of communicating the same message, and that choice of language and text organization to communicate their message depends to a large extent on audience, communicative purpose and generic convention."
par. 26 as an added bonus, seeing so many students' efforts to do the same writing task--"variations on a theme"--helps teachers better understand the task & how to talk about it.

disadvantages
par. 33 "they can be overused"
par. 34 "students are not required to express their own ideas"
par. 35 what they're doing is an "incomplete" or "unbalanced" writing task--not realistic writing
par. 37 "artificiality" of contexts created for assignments
par. 38 finding/creating matierials is a pain.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:55 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

invader-g (genre 20.2/25)

Peach, Derek. "The Genrists are Coming." English Quarterly 29:2 (1997): 34-45.

1 sentence summary: sidebar the beer-obsession; explicit genre instruction brings w/it a danger of sliding back into prescriptivism & lock-step grammar rules as the work of school; genres that can be taught are artificially restricted & learning them won't transfer effectively to students learning to manipulate and control language the way they'll need to.

34. "text, say the genrists, can be described by its genre or purpose following the edict of 'form follows function'"; genre working its way into curriculum battles "promises to be...a clash between formalist or bottom-up and constructavist of top-down language instruction camps, but this time with a claim for that moral middle ground"
35. the theory, in kind-enough terms: "for genre studies advocates, a text has certain stylistic features that distinguish it from other texts, and to fail to apprise students of these distinguishing features of the established modes of discourse is to fail to educate them for a world where such knowledge is power"
36. an (ostensibly neutral) implication: "if a student wanted to know the structure of a procedural text for a piece of technical writing, you could coach that student through a series of sentences or paragraphs to produce it"
39. the key question: "now, do you want to do it? do you believe that you should teach specific text production, just because you can?"; he contends: "the genrists may have had their definitions mixed up to start with. what they call genres are really text components and those different features or components are always found in blends in longer written discourse outside of classroom samples"; isolated feature-sets are interesting, but "in the world at large, it's the blends by master craftsmen that hold sway"; "if" (& for him it's not an if) "we don't write in discreet little genre-specific packets, but rather express ourselves on issues with broadly-conceived discourse plans, then there is not much point in teaching the micro-text"; to do this "is to mislead writers into believing that there is only one correct blueprint for the text"; also sawyer & watson "assert[] that 'premature emphasis on form can hinder learning'" (& i'm sure they're not the only ones who've noticed)
40. ("although sometimes we may wonder whether any one human being can acutally teach another how to achieve fluency in written discourse, we still have to know what methods are being advocated by which interest groups, if only to avoid the ridiculous" <--here's another classic why-bother. why do we bother, when our publishing contributors can't resist the barbs revealing that they can't really hold on either?)
42. "power for me in education is the ability to make distinctions and to use them. it is more important to express effectively--to do what works--than to be able to specify the generic features of each member of a taxonomy of texts" <--& everybody i've read writing in genre studies would agree with him; does he know that & is taking the extreme to show where the slide when christie & the let's-make-it-explicit camp can lead, or has he really only seen them?
43. "explicit instruction may have a beneficial influence on the work of weaker students" but only as a prepping-for-the-assignment move; there's no guarantee they learn anything about meaning & applicability beyond the moment. his argument for what matters is the same thing devitt & bawarshi promote: "showing students how texts are designed to produce a desired purpose; that is, how authors...employ a variety of constructions to achieve that desired purpose"; his definitions are just different: "the essay may be viewed or deconstructed to illustrate its schematic, but purpose, not consistency of genre, must be the focus"

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

sharks and kangaroos (genre 20.1/25)

Christie, Frances. "Writing in Schools: Generic Structures as Ways of Meaning." Functional Approaches to Writing Research Perspectives. Ed. Barbara Couture. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 1986. 221-40.

conclusion: "in learning to write, children are engaged in learning to construct meanings. as they do so, they learn to select from the resources available within the language system appropriate lingustic items which are fashioned into different patterns to realizie different meanings....yet many children consistently fail to master the patterns of discourse and associated methods of working which schools are intended to teach....failure to master the skills, capacities, and knowledge of schooling goes hand in hand with an inability to handle the language structures necessary to make such mastery possible. once teachers are clear about the nature of these structures, they will be in a position to guide students' learning....and can draw attention...to the linguistic features of the different genres they must learn. further, they can invite their students to explore and to experiment with the linguistic structures through which meanings in writing are made, thus freeing writers from the needless mystery that sometimes surrounds it."

passages
221. "meaning is REALIZED in language"; "successful participation in one's culture involves learning to interpret and employ its ways of meaning"; the school behaviors we reward center on "developing methods of reasoning, habits of working, styles of argument, ways of judging and valuing, and skills of analyzing and synthesizing information" <-- things we rarely explicitly address.
222. "though the evidence for relationships between patterns of discourse and ways of learning in schools is strong, many teachers continue to work with students in a manner which effectively denies the relationship"; "children learn both the skills that schools value and the language used to demonstrate those skills"--and not to uniform degrees; for genre means "not merely...those forms of writing normally valued in literary studies, but also...the expository forms or genres used to construct meaning in the various school disciplines."
224. "language and its relationship to learning is in an odd sense 'invisible.' it is the resource for learning which we most frequently use, yet most take for granted. thus, when teachers choose what they intend their students to learn, they tend to focus on 'content'....they believe that if students get the 'content' right, their language will in some fashion fall into place"; realistic implications of the relationship:

• "students in the process of learning content must manipulate different ways of constructing and organizing meaning in texts"
• "teachers must recognize the linguistic demands associated with the content areas of schooling, so that they may guide students more usefully in their learning"

we teach students narrative structures in school mostly by reading & expecting them to follow along, which of course works better for kids who are read to/with more. 229. c says "as children grow older, they learn to construct narratives of increasing complexity and variety, but at each stage, teachers will need to examine the kinds of generic structures they actually produce in order to ensure maximum progress" (this is a little hard to buy. if students who are exposed to lots of narrative structures learn w/o deliberate instruction, then isn't it just as (if not more) reasonable to argue for an increase in exposure?)

Posted by ttobryan at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

in oz & beyond (genre 17.3/25)

Gee, Smiljka. "Teaching Writing: A Genre-Based Approach." Writing in the English Language Classroom. Ed. Glenn Fulcher. Hemel Hempstead, England: Prentice Hall Europe ELT. 1997. 24-40.

1 sentence summary: the genre approach has potential--genre-learning is relevant, its structural nature comforting, and its ability to heighten students' textual awareness positive--but is demanding of both teachers and students in its complexity, requiring that both share a metalanguage for discussing grammar & other linguistic/textual features; if we're going to recommend it, we shouldn't expect teachers to do it on their own without substantial training.

24-5. rationale for the development of the genre approach was australian theorists' (halliday, martin et al) concerns about the exclusivity perpetuated by traditional approaches; the hope was that explicit instruction in literary practice would grant entrance to traditionally excluded students into the in-crowd of those already or likely to become familiar w/it.
27. for them, genre represented "a staged, goal-oriented social process": "genres are referred to as social processes because members of a culture interact with each other to achieve them; as goal oriented because they have evolved to get things done; and as staged because it usually takes more than one step for participants to achieve their goals" (martin et al.); explicitness = access (& = "teaching grammar again")

all the tricky details
genre & register:
28. register = "a language 'variety according to use'" (as contrasted to dialect as "variety 'according to the user'"); register varies by situation; situation is comprised of field ("what is going on... the area of operation of the language activity"), mode (primarily writing vs. speaking), & tenor ("'the relations among participants'" and registers along this dimension vary in terms of formality"); martin's model is 3-tiered: "it consists of genre, register, and language. all three strata are interpreted semiotically, that is, as systems for making meaning"; there's also a difference between "connotative and denotive semiotic systems"; "language has a phonology and therefore has means of realisation. genre and register, on the other hand, are connotive systems, systems which rely on other systems to realise their meaning. they rely on language." (emphasis added)
29. "the role of genre as the content plane for register is 'to constrain the possible combinations of field, mode, and tenor variables used by a given culture'" (martin); "this means that no culture allows for all possible combinations"; "the principle of constraint is extended to all three levels from genre to register and register to langauge."
functional grammar:
30. "all languages [are] organised around two kinds of meaning: the ideational or reflective, and interpersonal or active"; "to understand the world around us...and to act on others in it....the third component is the textual, the function of which is to create text" (<--halliday-->); "a functional grammar is based on the correlation between the categories of the situation...field, tenor and mode and those of the semantic system...ideational, interpersonal and textual--so that 'the field is reflected in the experiential meanings of the text, the tenor in the interpersonal meanings and the mode in the textual meanings"; "people communicate in terms of the ability of speakers to make predictions which operate from the context to langauge and from the language to context"
31. basic grammar our students don't know, which is ridiculous: phrases/clauses include (1) process, (2) participant, & (3) circumstance. usually these are shown by (1) verbsies (2) nounsies & (3) the "adverbial group or prepositional phrase." i'm having burke flashbacks, but w/less alcohol & more sentence-diagramming
genre analysis:
33. "genres differ in terms of purpose and structure"--a narrative won't look like "factual genres" whose "purpose is to interpret the world around us"; each has diff. recognizeable necessary stages.

genre pedagogy:
35. in the classroom "the genre approach" looks like "a cycle known as the curriculum cylcle or 'wheel'....divided into a number of stages with the aim of developing first, learner awareness of genres. learners were presented with models of different genres which were analysed in terms of purpose, structure and language. from the modelling stage learners moved to a negotiating stage which involved joint negotiation with the teacher....the next stage was the independent construction stage which involved preparation, drafting, conferencing and evaluating activities"
36. its problems included the model being hard to understand or apply, for teachers, and being organized counterintuitively, starting each genre with new knowledge rather than building cognitively on the old, for students. a proposition to better these "teaching-learning experiences" called for "chang[ing] the orientation of the approach from product to process," for a "more flexible interpretation of genre," for emphasizing teaching grammar, & for "involving learners with the concrete world and its phenomena first and then moving towards the abstract"

pros (p. 39):
(1) emphasis on "relevance in terms of the needs of students and relevance for the context";
(2) "the explicitness" often critiqued is actually good b/c it "provides the learner with a framework within which different aspects of genre can be slotted" to "scaffold" learing from;
(3) "genre awareness both in terms of the types of genres that are relevant and their characteristic features is essential so that the student is aware of the expectations of the context in which writing is practiced, and the purposes that different genres serve in society and cultlure. also, an awareness of language as a resource for making meaning and demonstrating how this resource can be used for the realisation of selected meaning is important"; &
(4) genre analysis gives teachers a pragmatic framework for "provid[ing] feedback on students' writing" & can allow "students [to] be involved in the genre analysis of their own writing" (doesn't really say how)

cons (p. 39):
(1) "the theoretical basis...requires both the teacher and learner to be engaged in linguistic analyses which requires...the relevant metalanguage, together with an understanding of the concepts of grammar which operates at three different levels..." &
(2) "it requires familiarity with linguistic concepts such as cohension and thematic structure"; "it is difficult to implement because of the conceptual demands that it makes on those who use it."

Posted by ttobryan at 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2005

bridging the ravine (genre 17.2/25)

Maimon, Elaine P. "Maps and Genres: Exploring Connections in the Arts and Sciences." Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983. 110-125.

1 sentence summary: as lit & comp people we're qualified to speak about discourses & genres in ways valuable to larger contexts than our fields; we need to teach our students about language in ways that encourage them to take part in this connectivity, & studying disciplinary genres is a way for them to develop this key awareness.

* this is also a serious crossover to collaboration--not writing so much but definitely learning, as that's what the whole second half of the piece is actually about.

passages (genre)
110. training in lit crit preps us to "map the genres"--as if they're a finite set?; our naming betrays our attitudes--the "broad area of discourse" we call "nonfiction prose" reveals our "disrespect for communities removed from our own, because we lump all their distinct prose under this imprecise label" defined by negation of what we value more. "if we look closely at our capacity for generic mapping, we may find other highly cultivated understandings that we have derived from our literary studies and that we can effectively draw upon to make ourselves better scholars and teachers of composition"--the ideal is to "bridge the gap" & become "scholars of language"
111. "a theory of genre defines the terms of the relationship between reader and writer, speaker and listener. readers and writers are partners, just as reading and writing, speaking and listening are connected, interactive processes. we can understand the importance of generic considerations most clearly from instances of failed communication"; "the forms of writing within a particular intellectual community manifest modes of thinking within that community. a lyric poet learns to behave like a lyric poet by reading and hearing lyric poetry. when the poet writes his [sic] own lyric poem, he [sic] creates something that never existed before but that bears a family resemblance to other lyric poems. without that family resemblance and the mannerisms that go with it, the piece of writing is anomalous and communication is at risk, unless we can identify a resemblance to another family"
112. how it is: "a genre is more than a bundle of conventional details about the spacing of words on the page, footnote format, and other arbitrary matters. the configurations that form our surface definition of genre have a heuristic potential"; "those of us who specialize in the analysis of discourse know that the better a writer understands the conventions of a particular genre, the more creative the writer can be in breaking the rules for effect"; "conventions are expectations in the minds of readers. readers who are members of the same intellectual community share these expectations because of a history of common experiences"; fish & "the authority of interpretive communities"--we recognize what we see b/c of our community affiliations & experiences;
113. "genre conventions are constructed by a community that has practiced writing particular kinds of texts. in all disciplines texts are made, not decoded." this might be profound, but i'm not sure i know what she means when she says it; this is too, or at least it sounds cool--> "the conventions of report writing are in a sense theatrical techniques to help scientists maintain the objective stance"
115. an extract for the youth on why it matters:

since generic conventions pertain to knowledgeable behavior within a defined context, each genre has its own serious faux pas. a scientist who writes, 'the data indicates' instead of 'the data indicate' is not simply committing an error in subject/verb agreement, nor is he [sic] merely showing ignorance of latin neuter plural forms. he [sic] is telling other scientists that he [sic] is inexperienced with data, that he [sic] has not worked with or reported data, and that he [sic] is therefore not an experienced member of the scientific community

116. studying generic constraints "expands [students'] understanding of genre as a concept" & "analyzing and practicing the generic rituals of a number of communities helps students develop the intellectual mobility of educated people" is that what we have?; questions & metaphors (disciplinarity): "the field notebook of an anthropologist...will record answers to questions that many of us in literature would rarely think to ask"; "critical thinking means making choices, asking the right questions"

passages (sliding into collaboration)
121. "our community is defined by conversation"; rorty & culture as conversation: "our goal as scholars is to keep the conversation going. our goal as teachers is to guide students into new communities and to help novices gain an authentic voice in our conversations. we enter a new community when we learn to talk with its citizens. and we learn to talk with them when we understand the generic properties of their conversations. rorty emphasizes dialectic, not necessarily because dialectic will lead to truth, but because it keeps the lines of communication open"
122. one of our jobs: to "provide our students with systematic instruction and practice for conversing with each other," to "create an environment that simulates that of the academic community at large" here's me taking issue w/this, & remembering that 1983 was a long time ago; "to create such an environment, we should educate students to respond productively and critically to each others' work in progress. these experiences in collaborative learning help students become socialized into the academic community....but students must grow to value something else as well: the communication of reasoned belief. students must learn to express ideas coherently and logically, to draw inferences, to suggest analogies, and to refer to appropriate authorities. liberal education is a process of learning how scholars behave, in the general academic community and in the smaller social groupings of their disciplines"
124. "students need help in learning to converse rather than compete. students are too little accustomed to listening to each other or to reading each other's work with attention. without actual conversations about one's work, a novice writer is at a particular disadvantage. the lonely beginner condemned to the linearity of ink on the blank page hears all the wrong voices"; "experienced writers know how to imagine a reader who is 'partially a reflection of themselves and functions as a critical and productive collaborator--a collaborator who has yet to love their work.' students need the actual experience of sharing work in progress if they are ever to internalize this essential dialogic" (quoting sommers from 'revision strategies'); this part is important: "collaborative learning does not imply coauthorship. in fact, as we well know, colleagueship leads to a greater sense of authority and individual responsibility for one's work. when we share our work with colleagues, we proudly acknowledge their help, not simply to repay an honest debt, but to connect ourselves to the community of those who have helped us"
125. & this part is creepy: "our discipline makes us especially equipped to understand otherness. as literary critics, we spend much of our time mapping fictional worlds, so that we can better understand the strangers who live there. as composition scholars, we have assumed the related task of mapping the universe of discourse. i am suggesting that we abandon the fiefdoms and guard towers...[so as to] draw more accurate maps" which will enable "our students and ourselves" to become "more confident explorers...to the fascinating and exotic communities across the sea" yes, she actually says "exotic." question is, how much does my discomfort with this paint the other things she says in an unsavory light?

Posted by ttobryan at 08:25 PM | Comments (0)

wide-framed (genre 19/25)

Bleich, David. Know and Tell: A Writing Pedagogy of Disclosure, Genre, and Membership. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1998.

1 sentence summary: the "materiality of language" and the troubled position of the writing class within the academy have led our field approach its task in pedagogically unsound ways; to do justice to both our subject matter and our students, we need to recognize the roles of language in individuals' lives, in public lives, in the construction and continuation of the university, and in the messy intersections competing interests from those quarters create.

passages:
xv. the materiality of language is in vogue as a popular study thanks to poststructural interests, but still hadn't overtaken "the more accepted perspective" he terms "the spirituality of language: the view that there is a meaning that is separate from the word-in-use...that readers and interpreters articulate in contexts separate from the reading and viewing contexts" (links to ong's separation btw. oral & literate).
23. def. 1 (& implication): "texts are located in cultures through their genres--the groups of other texts with which they could be compared or associated. changes in culture are noticed through changes in genre."
24. "the psychoanalytic potential of genre is that it marks what is usually unconscious in verbal and symbolic interaction....the genre action, like the unconscious action...follows certain orderly procedures and paths that are not on our minds as we say what we have to say"; teachers' job should be to find out what genres & language-use patterns students possess, to "inform themselves about the students' educational status"; "the genre idea is a means of identifying students' knowledge of, and abilities with, language and writing"
35. "a signal of the change in approach to genre is given by the interest in mixed genres--their 'impurity' as well as their inherent changeability"
36-7. "writing appears in a form that is made up of several other forms that, like the form identifying the writing now, should be understood as being in the midst of social and historical change"--although a particular book's "present historical form is the novel...this way of identifying that book could change into a dream tract or a joke or something else by succeeding generations of readers. this is a materialist use of the genre idea"; "rather than the abstraction 'writing' (which applies a certain equivalence of all kinds), historical, social, and cultural practices and experiences of living people are the point of reference for understanding genres of language, literature, and other writing. the material differences in practice and experience lead to the necessity, though not to the rigidity, of boundaries"
38. "if individual people, texts, genres are recognized through being named, it is also true that the name could be understood differently when different elements in a category are more germane. depending on the observers, there is a range of possible categorical identities in society. to allow that there are genres is to allow that they are always made up of subkinds or cokinds and that the particular mix of each category varies with culture as well as with the perspectives of local observers."
41. in specific, the thing he does that drives me batty: conflates "genre" with "any way of using language"--in this case, "black english is a mixed genre of language." multi-level problematic.
80. "the genres of men's language" = all contexts in which men use language? it's more than a little unclear, & as far as i'm concerned way the hell imprecise--not that precision is mandatory, but it does make things easier to talk about.

Posted by ttobryan at 04:19 PM | Comments (0)

December 01, 2005

w[o]rd science (genre 18/25)

Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition, Culture, Power. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. 1995.

premise: "what microlevel studies of actors' situated actions frequently depict as individual processes can also be interpreted (from the macrolevel) as communicative acts within a discursive network or system" & genre is the magic that makes it possible.

passages
ix.genre knowledge = "an individual's repertoire of situationally appropriate responses to recurrent situations"
29. "genre conventions are products of discourse communities and are thereby 'windows' into the functioning of such communities. as fairclough (1992) noted, 'a genre implies not only a particular text type, but also particular processes of producing, distributing, and consuming texts... changes in social practice are both manifested on the plane of language in changes in the system of genres, and in part brought about by such changes (p. 126)"
45. question guiding the science-study: "what kinds of knowledge (of the genre, of research networks or the research front) must scientist-authors draw on to make the case for novelty?"
58-9. conclusion: what science is--to the writer experimentation is real & write-up conventions entail creating a "phony story" to explain what went on; to the journal expecting a certain presentation of material, there is "no such distinction between laboratory activity and rhetorical accommodation," and "far from being a phony story...the larger narrative [contextualizing the experimentation within necessary background] is, in a sense, the real story"; "science [is] an inductive, cumulative activity" reinforced & defined by repeated practice & rhetorical patterning.
79. kress & choice: "even in a situation of great constraint and awareness of convention, i can act unpredictably, assessing in a particular instance the consequences of my action differently to what would normally be predicted"; & so giddens "duality of structure"--our actions make it & our made by it
98. abstracts (& other reproduceable forms) have both "general features" (found in both successful and many unsuccessful submissions) and "distinguishing features" (found only in successful submissions) (& ccccs, those meanies, don't publish the accepted ones so that future submitters can see what distinguishes winning entries)
150. "sociolinguistic studies of genre activity as part of larger processes of enculturation can reveal the subtexts, conflicts, compromises, and negotiations in addition to those more centripetal forces in conventional language use"
152. they also like lave & werner's concept of "legitimate peripheral participation"
153. resistance to explicit teaching is often associated with teachers' reluctance to return to the prescriptivism of teaching the "rhetorical modes"
155. aligns different researchers with their positions regarding language acquisition & genre--some agree that "when the patterns of interaction and language system of [children's] home and community are at variance with that of school culture" children will struggle with new genres & should be explicitly taught the new genres to help them gain access to the school's cultural system; others hold that "what is most important is that teachers secure for children the opportunity to develop their understanding of new concepts through whatever conventions are most 'natural' to them"
158. kress on christie's egg stories: "the critical issue is not whether children do or do not have the freedom to experiment with different generic conventions, but rather whether or not children's innovations can succeed within the broader culture": "neither these nor Joel's innovations are likely to succeed, because the child-writers are the least 'authorized' writers in the culture, and their innovations can be quite disregarded....this is why childish innovations fail: not because they do not constitute perfectly plausible solutions to textual/cognitive problems, but because they are supported neither by a stable social occasion, nor by 'authority' (41-42)."
160. although individual creativity is important & valuable, genres are not "simply 'mind-forged manacles.' on the contrary, we would argue that genres are essential elements of language just are words, syntactic structures, and sound patterns. in order to express one's individual thoughts, one must use available patterns for speech, that is to say, genres, in one way or another. virtually every communicative interchange between people, whether in speech or in writing, involves generic structure; in any language there are large numbers of established genres from whcih to choose. furthermore, far from being rigid templates, genres can be modified according to the rhetorical circumstances"
161. "students are manacled only when teachers fail to expose them to a broad range and appropriate use of curriculum genres"
163. also, they like vygotsky's "construct of the zone of proximal development"--together w/vygotsky, they think "a genre approach to the teaching of writing does not fit many language arts and composition teachers' conception of their role, given their training, ideological loyalties, and professional allegiances," and so "rethinking the training" of these professionals "as well as the current curricula in language arts and university writing courses may be what is called for"

Posted by ttobryan at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2005

the so-what part (genre 17.1/25)

Holdstein, Deborah H. "Power, Genre, and Technology [response to Kathleen Yancey and Michael Spooner]" CCC 47:2 (1996): 279-83.

1 sentence summary: whyfore the will to "genre-ize" the internet (specifically email) & will it do us any good?

passages:
280. spooner & yancey's essay is "one of those watershed essays," one that "evoke[s] in a single essay many of the most salient issues inovlved in technology and composition studies in a scholarly and innovative merging of form and content"; "the specter of 'genre' is a particularly vexing one, raising any number of issues, questions, and contexts--western and non-wester, traditional and alternative....to create a genre is an act of empowerment and potential disempowerment. when we read a sonnet, we measure it against basic criteria of this genre within a genre and against a particular view of the best of that genre. the criteria that make a particular genre itself enable readers to recognize a work when it fits...and to measure another by its standards when it fails to measure up"
281. "while Freedman affirms that we still need to know how to categorize...types of prose...we are less sure what to call and 'how to read the mixed-genre' prose of comtemporary feminists"; dh would "extend this quandary to the mixed-genre qualities of the discourses prevalent on the internet. do we need to name these discourses as much as we need to read them?" like the "literary mosaic" Freedman identifies for "feminist post-critics," dh suggests "that the internet offers a similar multilayered, multivalenced set of textualities" & "this blending offers the possibilities and difficulties of a type of genre bordercrossing, and the inevitable readerly as well as writerly conflicts stemming from the distance between what we all seem to want the internet to be (free, utopian) and our simultaneous certainty that it already replicates the hierarchies of its users (androcentric, judgmental, rule-governed)....if it is part of any genre, it is a 'baggy-monstered' cross-genre, and in being so once again replicates and to some extent subsumes the other genres enacted within it, crossing other types of socio-cultural concerns and borders in its wake: among them, access, privacy, and ownership, a certain simultaneity of judgment (sometimes made known to the writer, sometimes not), not to mention unsettling, techno-inducted reproductions of street-life hazards"
282. possible answers: "the critic-theorist's mode of knowledge is 'categorizing'"; "perhaps this, too, describes the need to validate or categorize the internet--to justify our time and contributions on various lists, perhaps, and to academically validate cyberspace as a forum for scholarly work and publication"
283. also, "one might argue that by virtue of being on-line, computer-based writing boasts far more distinctive features--i'd say problems, again, of access, publication, ownership, and so on--than simply being 'transmitted via computer'"; another important question: "what other invisible hierarchies--in addition to the ones we know and understand that relate to gender, power, and so on--will be formed to order us as we 'slouch towards cyberspace'?"
284. "a number of critics...assert that each new technology excludes women from its spheres of influence (and it is true that the vast majority of the people using the net [in 1996] are male)"; "what are the ways in which we seem to 'know' the gender of the person writing even when the writer masks his or her gender?; overall, then, spooner & yancey's essay "helps us see the net with a renewed, harsh glare towards the interface, highlighting to the profession the social, ideological, and power relationships replicated on new technologies and the ways in which we much acknowledge, confront and--is it even possible?--redefine those spaces"

Posted by ttobryan at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

development reconsidered (genre 16.3/25)

Prince, Michael B. "Literacy and Genre." College English 51 (1989): 730-49.

1 sentence summary: rather than leading students through a sequence of writing activities based on a model of cognitive development that assumes a uniformity that doesn't exist (& might not work anyway), we should lead them through a sequence evolving from more familiar to less familiar genres so that they become acquainted with academic writing by writing in successive approximations to it.

passages
730. developmental psych's approache to cognitive sequencing "fails to consider the extent to which cognitive development may be influenced by a child's exposure to different kinds of discourse," plus, "the ability to achieve college-level literacy will often depend upon a student's prior familiarity with the discursive behavior he or she is asked to exhibit in school," which is why we "need...a social...basis" instead. argument: "every student possesses a socially constituted generic lexicon, which functions as a complex code of verbal behavior," & "our success with students whose generic lexicon does not already predict success with the essay depends, then, upon our ability to establish mediating links between familiar and unfamiliar generic contexts"
733. effective "generic replacement serves to counteract the inherent advantage of teachers over students"--one in which academy members & academic genres are always more isolated, intellectual, & removed from social realities than the genres of students.
738. "when individuals lose connection with the currents of familiar social discourse, when they isolate themselves in a distant observatory or are isolated within a barren discursive tract, then madness--or dullness--or both--threaten"--"intellecutal and discursive solitude" leads to "a feeling of powerlessness"
739. to reverse this, bringing "the...ficure of knowledge...into contact with patterns of interaction from a more familiar sphere....brings about a recontextualization of knowledge"
745. "missing from Elbow's celebration of free-writing is an indication of how students are to move from lyrical self-expression to successful writing in school"--the demands of school writing "suggest[] the need for a differen kind of intervention, a shift in the students' conceptual relation to writing"--"a shift towards [using in classrooms] genres that inscribe a sense of writing as direct communication": "we might, in other words, imagine a sequence of assignments moving from generic contexts closer to actual patterns of verbal interaction to patterns further removed"
747. his model "refamiliarizes students with the conversational cues that inform their face-to-face interactions and then gradually shows them how to submerge these cues within the more discursive strategies of essay organization. the movement is from imagining a familiar, highly specific reader to positing an unfamiliar audience; from exploring familiar topics generated from texts; from writing within a 'climate' that encourages the first person voice, informal development of thought, vairety of tone, and so on, to establishing a more formal context, within which one ix expected to use the third person and develop a coherent, unified argument"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)

teaching term papers (genre 16.2/25)

Mustafa, Zahra. "The Effect of Genre Awareness on Linguistic Transfer." English for Specific Purposes 14:3 (1995): 247-56.

1 sentence summary: because "conscious knowledge of genre structure plays an important role in effective use of English in academic settings," "raising university students' awareness of term paper conventions" by explicitly teaching how to write term papers leads to students' creation of better term papers. (247)

rationale:
248. "despite the availability of...manuals and style guides, it is still necessary to provide explicit instruction on the constraints and the opportunities of the genre specific context (swales 1987...)....it is also well established that explicit instruction on academic genres introduces students to the intellectual activities of a certain discipline such as writing research reports; it acquaints them with the issues addressed and how they are resolved by the different lines of reasoning, assumptions about the audience, the writer's ethos and the purpose of communication (bazerman 1981; bizzel 1982)" but the details haven't been thoroughly explored.
249. in this context, "formal instruction" = "the taking of a course on term paper writing which includes providing detailed explanation, giving examples and exercises, indicating references (books, articles, manuals, handouts) and evaluation"
252. one problem: "the weight given to [an array of standard] conventions in the final evaluation of the paper varies from one professor to another and is not related to the provision of instructions on such aspects. three of those who provide instruction allocate to them 20% of the grade, while the other three do not give them any weight and may or may not comment on them. similarly, one of those who do not provide any instruction gives such aspects 20%, but the other does not."
254. result: "formal instruction through a special course on writing term papers plays an important role in raising students' awareness of the conventions and macrostructure of this genre" & "it is necessary that co-ordination between...teachers should include an agenda for agreeing on the features of the genres required from students and the criteria set for their evaluation"

response: meh. the charts & "data" don't clearly demonstrate (at least to me) the validity of the "instruction is important" claim, & the "it only really works if teachers agree first" caveat kinda kills it for me--the reality is that teachers (and broader-level academic & professional standards) don't all agree, so while teaching-to-the-test works as a short-term solution to an incredibly localized problem, its larger applicability is pretty darn consistently nil.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

by any other name? (genre 16.1/25)

Bhatia, Vijay K. "Genre-mixing in Academic Introductions." English for Specific Purposes. 16:3 (1997): 181-196.

1 sentence summary: the variously named elements of academic works that serve to introduce those works both overlap far more than the array of names reserved for them would indicate (such that there's often no way to distinguish a "preface" from a "prologue" from an "introduction" from a "forward") and sometimes sneakily share generic properties with such other genres as advertisements.

definitions
181. genre analysis "is the study of situated linguistic behavior in institutionalized academic or professional settings, whichever way one may look at it, whether in terms of typifications of rhetorical action...regularities of staged, goal oriented social processes...or consistency of communicative purposes" & genres "are essentially defined in terms of the use of language in conventionalized communicative settings. they are meant to serve the goals of specific discourse communities, and in so doing, they tend to establish relatively stable structural forms and, to some extent, even constrain the use of lexico-grammatical resources in expressing those forms"
183. many introductory "genres" "share the same communicative purpose of introducing the book," while "some of them occasionally incorporate a number of other minor purposes too"--"academic," "promotional," & maybe other?
185. they usually share "set conventions to number pages in roman numerals rather than Arabic numbers" (& maybe that's illuminative, & maybe it occludes)
186. one possibility: "over a period of time, these historically somewhat distinct genres have come so close to each other that they seem to have lost whatever traditional distinctions they may have had"
187. "it is not uncommon to find a dual communicative purpose in academic introductions, to introduce the book and to promote it to the potential readers, who may be tempted to invest in the knowledge being offered"
188. advertising is marked by adjectives; "promotional letters" with "i'd love to hear your comments" appeals
190. claim: "this mixing of generic resources...to introduce variation in genre construction, whether it is a deliberate mixing of communicative purposes, or a subtle exploitation of one generic context to communicate private intentions, is always considered to be tactically superior and hence must not be viewed as transgression of generic conventions. it tends to give considerable tactical freedom to expert members of the