Faigley's piece from this week's assignment discusses the expressive, cognitive, and social views of writing disciplines.
The expressive view allows a "person the integrity to dominate his subject with a pattern both fresh and original" (654). This movement was one that prominent rhetor Peter Elbow follows and often deals with experiments in composing. Cognitive viewing had to do with heurisitcs and analysis, but very little to do with actual composition. Lastly, the social view pulls together a number of disciplines and holds that "human language can be understood only from the perspective of a society rather than a single individual" (659).
The social view is much like the cooperative learning that was in the reading last week -- pulling minds together to find a truth (little t) that all can benefit from.
What vexes me in the article is that none of the three views discusses the actual act of composing. They discuss the what should be in pre-writing, but little with the composition process. Why leave out he most important part?
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I believe Faigley offers insight into your question, Dave, by asking "why college writing courses are prevalent in the United States and rare in the rest of the world; why the emphasis on teaching writing occurring in the aftermath of the 'literarcy crisis' of the seventies has not abated; why the majority of college writing courses are taught by graduate students and other persons in nontenuarable positions (663). Rather than write another article on composition, it appears, Faigley is attempting to address the issues that contribute to classroom failure.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed that many of the articles that we have read deal mostly with heuristics as well. I have also been aggravated because they never seem to move to the actual process of writing, but then I thought this may be because the part of the writing process that people struggle with the most is the invention stage. It is the stage the writers struggle to explain to others and sometimes can't. Most people who have written anything will struggle to decide what to write about.
ReplyDeleteI also see that most of the articles we have read have focused on what is typically defined as the beginning of the process (pre-writing, invention, etc) or the end of the process (analsis, revision, etc). In order to answer your question about why the actual process of writing is not addressed, it is neccessary to define the writing proces. If you think of the writing process as linear than you are correct in stating that the middle componant, the actual writing, has been neglected. If however, you view the writing process as a non-linear activity in which each of the pre-defined stages (pre-writing, writing, and re-writing) occurs multiple times and in various orders than that neglect is not so clear. In other words, if we are constantly inventing, revising, and creating as we write, it makes sense to focus on pre-writing and re-writing as they influence all stages of the writing process.
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