Thoughts Paper

As I am attempting to narrow my focus for my final paper, most of my reading responses will be to topics relating to my area of interest in composition: specifically the idea of audience and how it is changing for fiction and non-fiction writers in a world that is becoming increasingly more “connected” and yet more isolated all at once. I think interesting comparisons could be drawn to Brandt’s essay “Remembering Reading, Remembering Writing” in regards to personal, nonacademic writing. I think a lot has changed in this realm of composition, especially the increase in popularity of online journals (where the idea of privacy is almost laughable) and the use of social networking sites like Facebook to express intensely personal thoughts.
Ong’s article on the audience as a fiction is also very interesting to me as I attempt to explore how the idea of an audience is changing. For example, who do the authors of online journals see as their audience? Do they see it as a truly personal medium, or is the allure in the faceless readers who can anonymously comment. To go past Ong’s argument, I think it can be contended that authors of online content can often not only fictionalize and frame their audience, they often have a hand in shaping them (with such a wide variety of reading material online, it seems that an online journal readership would be comprised mostly of people of similar demeanors, personalities, and problems), adding another dimension of isolation to the medium. Elbow’s ideas on “ignoring the audience” essentially non-applicable, in a format where you can get a personal response within minutes of typing the last word.
Another topic I think would be interesting to address (and the point I thought was most lacking from Bruffee’s article on collaborative learning) is the disparity in ideas of audience between introverted and extroverted writers. While composition theorists seem to want to overlook the minutia of character that can so drastically shape a composition style, I think it is crucial to address within the context of collaborative learning and writing. In Bruffee’s example, it seems almost ignorant to ignore the fact that there are people who simply prefer to work alone, and create better in isolation due to simply being more content than when they work with others. In the world of new media and social networking, it would seem logical that an introverted person would react far differently than an extrovert to these new forms of composition, which feature a vast potential audience of strangers and friends, as well as the potential for immediate feedback, criticism and/or praise. I would also be interested as to how personality type informs what kind of writing a person likes to do, it seems to me through my collegiate career that the people who have a propensity for journalism and nonfiction have strikingly different demeanors than those who compose sonnets or write short stories. I would think personality type, as well as style preference, would inform a lot about how a writer perceives his or her audience.
I don’t really take much stock in the articles which attempt to outline composition in a formulaic way, and I think most all of the research and surveying for my paper will have to be qualitative in nature. While articles like “Writing as a Mode of Learning” and serve as a good foundation for composition theory, the ideas I’m looking at deal with composition and learning on a realm that the authors of these articles couldn’t even imagine. Janet Emig would have had no way to forsee the phenomenon of Facebook, though it is interesting to imagine how the idea of status updates would have tied in with her “languaging processes.” The idea of revision, as outlined extensively in the article by Sommers is almost nonexistent in the world of digital composition, where you can tweet faster than you can spellcheck, and That said, articles like these provide the history of composition, while my paper will attempt to explain the differences in composition today, and potentially how the field will continue to move forward.

Ignoring Audience

While I think Elbow's theories about ignoring an audience are interesting, and the arguments make sense tome, I don't see ignoring one's audience as something that can feasibly accomplished. Unless you were raised as a recluse, sheltered from society, you always have some concept of what a potential audience for your writing must be, our self-consciousness comes from inadequacies we perceive when comparing ourselves with those around us, and self-consciousness in writing is no different. Even when we strive to emulate a style of writing, we do that because it has proven popular, found itself a niche audience that we too wish to play into. Conversely, even in the so called "desert island" writing exercise, the writer is conscious of the audience that is NOT there, and forms their words accordingly. So there is always some sense of audience, I don't believe it is possible to ignore it completely.
While it's true that we don't always have to write FOR our audience (that is, keep them in the front of our minds while composing and write for them to read), I still think it is true that all writing is conscious of it's audience or a potential audience, as the author is always a member of a society that is to this day putting increasing emphasis on perception by others.

Writing as a Process of Valuing

I think the idea of value at it is first introduced plays heavily on the selfish nature of human beings. Meaning is constructed upon how much value the words have to the audience, though I would argue that the characteristics of the boy in the second scenario are not things that we outgrow. Deep down, we all still want people to desire the same things we do, making it that much to attain. Along with the example of the photos of grandchildren are thousands of others: spilling personal detail on social networking sites, calling into talk radio, most reality television. The words never have as much meaning for your audience as they do for the speaker, yet human beings continue these public displays of emotional information in order to get attention. However, I do think our perception and reaction to our audience changes over time, as the examples show, as we grow in our writing, we advance in commiserating with our audiences and appealing to their value systems.

I agree with the assessment that making meaning is an act of valuing, and the examples given made me consider just how much conflict there is in the word because of ignorance to others values. From something as small as Jeanne's argument against those who denounce homemakers, to something as large as the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict, the value is so often placed in the words used in argument. This is problematic as the statements from one side have little meaning to the other because their value systems are so drastically different. A problem worth addressing, though it often seems unsolvable.

Collaborative Learning

It did not surprise me that this article was published more recently than most of the others we have read. While some of the ideas are relevant to the theories we have read before (language as a means of learning, etc.), this idea of "collaborative" learning is something that seemed to pop up in the eighties and has been a buzz word ever since. With new technology continuing to develop, this idea of collaboration has become more and more popular, but I'm not as optimistic about it's superpowers as Bruffee seems to be, and I have disagreements with his claims that the only way to learn how to think is through communication with others.
I guess my biggest issue with the article is how Bruffee sings the praises of collaborative learning without addressing any of the negative aspects. He mentions them at the very end: "conformity, anti-intellectualism, intimidation, and leveling down of quality," but his ideas about collaboration offer no real tools to combat these problems, what I see as very realistic problems anytime collaborative thinking is encouraged, especially among students of disparate style concerns and motivation levels. As a kid who went to public school for all but two years, I had little interest is any kind of collaborative work until I got to college and was able to work with people who were all focused on more or less the same thing I was. While I think encouraging discussion among students to further their general knowledge is a good idea, I don't quite believe collaborative learning to be the missing link in developing writers Bruffee makes it out to be.

Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer

Yet another example of these authors trying to qualitatively lump writers into categories. We've read about skilled/unskilled, experienced/inexperienced, and now we see perhaps the most generic of them all: "basic." I sometimes have a hard time figuring out exactly what unskilled, inexperienced, and basic mean in the context that these writers use them, and the best I can come up with is that the authors intend with these words to say "uneducated" without posturing themselves as "educated," meant to mean "better." "It's the people who aren't us," they illustrate through rambling sentences, charts and footnotes. "We know how to write right." Well, good for them.

Diatribe aside, this article is most obviously related to Emig's "Writing as a Mode of Learning," in fact it references the essay as it's introduction. However, this article seems more intent on how writers learn the specific rules and nuances of language as they write. I enjoy the Ryle quote on learning "how" versus learning "that" and I think that idea summarizes what most of the authors seem to be trying to explicate. I thought the examples were interesting, but they seemed to be very rigid in their rules, if all of her exercises are this way, I would imagine most of her students essay come out sounding exactly the same, how could they not. I don't think writing is as exact as she'd like it to be, for example, in the pattern sentence exercise, I could come up with at least two viable examples for each group of words, yet there seems to be one correct answer she was looking for. What does this say to the writers who come up with some slightly different, but equally coherent and correct? Is their process defective? Should we change them so that next time, they come up with the same formulaic answer demanded by "proper" writing? I don't think so.

A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing

Like some of the other articles we have read, this one attempts to break the practice of writing down into steps, explaining the physical and cognitive processes a writer goes through in order to create a work. However, I liked this article slightly better, if only for the grants it makes towards individual process and creativity. "The problem with stage descriptions of writing," the author states, "is that they model the growth of the written product, not the inner process of the person creating it." My process is different for almost every single type of writing, and I assume this must be true for many other writers as well. Why the great minds in the comp theory field seem so obsessed with dissecting and investigating the intangible workings and processes of the inner mind, I'll never know, but it just seems so futile to me.

I think what this article does really well is further illustrate the cognitive processes that go into writing, expanding and explicating on some of the topics Emig touched on when she wrote of writing as a means of learning. The steps of planning, translating, reviewing, etc., explained in such detail, show how a writer learns through the process of composing a paper,and makes corrections as such as they go. These thoughts on revision, or "regeneration" as Flower and Hayes put it, also tie in nicely with the article of revising process.

Audience as a Fiction

I think the ideal of the fictionalized audience is what makes writing such a unique form of art and communication. The idea of communicating without feedback, of needing to create characters and the world they live in as well as the lens they are viewed through adds an extra dimension of creative complication to the process of writing. I think this will be one of the most important practices to be maintained as the field of composition continues to develop, especially as technology and society continue to advance. I think our generation has begun to develop a skewed perception of what audience is, as people who thanks to the internet have an audience 24/7. I agree with parts of what the author discusses, but wonder how it will come to change as the idea of literacy does.

Revision Strategies

This is another article that attempts to quantify the practice of writing, something I'm still not sure if I'm comfortable with or not. For example, have studies been done on painters, analyzing the size and directionality of each individual brush stroke? If there have, they are probably taken as benign studies of habit, rather than the investigative agenda this article takes on.
Though the analysis of the different revision styles are interesting, I think the discrepancies between the two styles can be explained by one thing: purpose. Experienced writers in this case were defined as people who wrote professionally, for a living. The writing experience of the student writers on the other hand,was limited mostly to school assignments and related work. It is logical that two completely separate reasons for a practicing a skill would yield two completely different methods of doing it. Student writers are not writing for themselves, they are writing for the approval (and grade) givenby someone else. So they write what they think their audience wants to hear and revises likewise, to make things better. The professional, on the other hand, has developed a more personal relationship with writing, writing is beneficial to them, and so they are inclined to explore it further and revise in much the same way, to deepen and solidify their thoughts so as to best express it.