Rhetoric of Literate Action, A: Literate Action

A Rhetoric of Literate Action: Literate Action, Volume 1

By Charles Bazerman

The WAC Clearinghouse

wac.colostate.edu

Fort Collins, Colorado

Parlor Press

www.parlorpress.com

Anderson, South Carolina

PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING

Series Editor, Susan H. McLeod

The Perspectives on Writing series addresses writing studies in a broad sense. Consistent with the wide ranging approaches characteristic of teaching and scholarship in writing across the curriculum, the series presents works that take divergent perspectives on working as a writer, teaching writing, administering writing programs, and studying writing in its various forms.

The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press are collaborating so that these books will be widely available through free digital distribution and low-cost print editions. The publishers and the Series editor are teachers and researchers of writing, committed to the principle that knowledge should freely circulate. We see the opportunities that new technologies have for further democratizing knowledge. And we see that to share the power of writing is to share the means for all to articulate their needs, interest, and learning into the great experiment of literacy.

Recent Books in the Series

Katherine V. Wills and Rich Rice (Eds.), ePortfolio Performance Support Systems: Constructing, Presenting, and Assessing Portfolios (2013)

Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri (Eds.), The Centrality of Style (2013)

Chris Thaiss, Gerd Bräuer, Paula Carlino , Lisa Ganobcsik-Williams, and Aparna Sinha (Eds.), Writing Programs Worldwide: Profiles of Academic Writing in Many Places (2012)

Andy Kirkpatrick and Zhichang Xu, Chinese Rhetoric and Writing: An Introduction for Language Teachers (2012)

Doreen Starke-Meyerring, Anthony Paré, Natasha Artemeva, Miriam Horne, and Larissa Yousoubova (Eds.), Writing in Knowledge Societies (2011)

Martine Courant Rife, Shaun Slattery, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss (Eds.), Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom (2011)

David Franke, Alex Reid, and Anthony Di Renzo (Eds.), Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing (2010)

Publication Information

The WAC Clearinghouse, Fort Collins, Colorado 80523-1052

Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina 29621

© 2013 by Charles Bazerman. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

ISBN 978-1-64215-051-3 (pdf) | 978-1-64215-052-0 (epub) | 978-1-60235-473-9 (pbk.)

DOI 10.37514/PER-B.2013.0513

Produced in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bazerman, Charles.

A Rhetoric of Literate Action : Literate Action volume 1 / Charles Bazerman.

vii, 165 pages ; 23 cm. -- (Perspectives on Writing)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60235-473-9 (pbk.: acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-474-6 (hardcover: acid-free paper) -- 978-1-64215-051-3 (pdf) -- 978-1-64215-052-0 (epub)

1. Rhetoric. 2. Written communication. I. Title.

P301.B365 2013

808--dc23

2013033946

Copyeditor: Don Donahue

Designer: Mike Palmquist

Series Editor: Susan H. McLeod

The WAC Clearinghouse supports teachers of writing across the disciplines. Hosted by Colorado State University, it brings together scholarly journals and book series as well as resources for teachers who use writing in their courses. This book is available in digital format for free download at wac.colostate.edu.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paperback, cloth, and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press at www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina 29621, or e-mail editor@parlorpress.com

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Rhetorics of Speaking and Writing

Chapter 2. Knowing Where You Are: Genre

Chapter 3. When You Are

Chapter 4. The World of Texts: Intertextuality

Chapter 5. Changing the Landscape: Kairos, Social Facts, and Speech Acts

Chapter 6. Emergent Motives, Situations, Forms

Chapter 7. Text Strategics

Chapter 8. Emergent Form and the Processes of Forming Meaning

Chapter 9. Meanings and Representations

Chapter 10. Spaces and Journeys for Readers: Organization and Movement

Chapter 11. Style and Revision

Chapter 12. Managing Writing Processes and the Emergent Text

References

A Rhetoric of Literate Action: Literate Action

Volume 1

Introduction

Writing can seem an amorphous task. Writers seem to fill blank pages with inventions of endless possibilities—from cookbooks and instructions for the latest electronic gadget to prayer books and legal codes, from corporate reports on emerging markets and botanic treatises on leaf veins of deciduous trees to undergraduate papers for history courses and personal diaries of self-doubts. How do people do this amazing variety of things through writing? What can we say that would help us do these things more effectively?

Indeed the variety seems so great that general advice or analysis seems quixotic, and we ought to focus only on specific kinds of writing. One might be able to say something useful about historically-evolved cookbooks, and how one might go about producing one that speaks to the commercial market in the United States in the early twenty-first century. We have learned things about technical writing, business, and legal writing that have helped inform writing education of professionals in each of these domains. Research and pedagogy in Writing Across the Curriculum, in the Disciplines and Professions, and in the Workplace have guided approaches for developing writing of many specific types.

If the writing task is specific enough, detailed instructions can direct the text’s completion, such as filling out a government form properly (at least in the particular version of the form used in a particular year)—very detailed specifications tell us what we should write in each box and our writing choices are limited as to which address or ethnicity we might report. Even if the form contains a more open-ended narrative, such as in a grant application, often the material that needs to be covered and the order it should be covered in are directed by instructions and regulations. Such narrowed focus helps direct our work, but it also limits our thinking, expression, identities, and commitments. In the extreme cases of filling out forms we can become powerless subjects of bureaucratic definitions and regulations.

Yet writing can be a powerful tool of thinking, feeling, identity, commitment, and action. In turning our impulses into words, we can reveal ourselves to ourselves and to the world, and we can take place in important debates, movements, and activities. Writing forms the playing fields of our literate times and each piece of writing we do claims a place, identity, meaning, and action on those fields of life. The more we can write beyond the bounds of constrained bureaucratic prescriptions, the more we gain power to define and represent ourselves in the literate world.

But the problem of writing seems so amorphous that once we step out of highly directed, highly instructed writing situations we may quickly feel at sea, not knowing which direction to take and without signs to help us gain our bearings and make decisions. Even if we are released on a small confined, pond, such as writing a paper for a university political science course on political parties where we are told what ideas to refer to and which cases to discuss, we may still struggle to know which direction to go in.

Of course, in writing an essay for a political science course, the more we know about political science, the longer we have been in the course and have known the professor, the more political science papers we have read and written, the more we have learned the vocabulary and read the literature of political science and the historical accounts of political parties, and the more we know the genres of the field, then the more effectively and efficiently we can address the task. Yet underlying questions remain about what we want to accomplish and how we can do it in more deeply effective ways; that is, we cannot reduce our writing just to type, but must create it anew from our interests, resources, thoughts, and perceptions.

What would be useful in this and many other circumstances is a way of understanding our writing situation and what we might do with it—not just how writing is generally done in these circumstances but how we might transform the circumstances through our participation. This volume, A Rhetoric of Literate Action, offers an approach to understanding writing situations and how we can respond creatively in deep and transformative ways, because we understand the game and our moves more deeply. The first four chapters of this volume provide a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward. The next four chapters then consider how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer’s motives as the text begins to take form. The final four chapters provide more specific advice of the work to be accomplished in bringing the text to final form and how to manage the work and one’s own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively.

The advice of this book is for the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, and now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing. While the book contains some comments identifying challenges of developing writers and writers at social margins with an eye to how a writer can strategically address these challenges, those topics will not be at the center of discussion so as to maintain focus on strategic choice-making experienced writers,

Likewise, I will from time to time discuss collaborative writing processes, problems of multiple audiences, and the effects of changing technologies on writing, how to accomplish it, and what its impact is. To keep an already complicated and multidimensional subject as simple as I can, however, I will predominantly attend to the actions of individual experienced writers expressing their views and interests to readers, who each read one at a time, though from their social and organizational locations and interests. As should be evident from the presentation in this and the companion volume, the view of writing presented here is deeply dialogic, interactive, and social, but still writing and reading are done predominantly in semi-privacy, as readers and writers engage in their own thoughts in relation to the text, often for extended periods. Even in highly interactive collaborative processes, each participant must look inward to understand and evaluate the meanings evoked by the inscribed words. Further, writers aim to evoke meanings in individual readers, even though readers may be parts of teams or organizations, and readers attribute those evoked meanings as the expression of a writer, even if that writer is buried within complex corporate processes. In any event, what is here said about individuals can be, with care, extrapolated to more complex group processes.

Finally, while I will make some mention of multimedia and other communicative changes that are part of the digital age, the focus will be on the written word. The written word still maintains importance in digital environments, and we live in a world given shape by literacy. While the digital revolution is transforming our communicative and social environment, it is hard to know exactly what these changes will look like in even a few decades. What does seem clear though, is that the written word will maintain an important role for the foreseeable future and that the social changes will grow on a foundation established by the literate transformation of the past centuries. So it is of value for us to get our bearings in the written world as we venture forward into new communicative environments.

In providing advice about how to understand one’s communicative situation and respond strategically to it, this volume follows in the long tradition of books of rhetoric, from the time of Aristotle until today, but with some substantial differences, as I will discuss at the end of the first chapter. So as not to encumber the practical orientation of the book, I will keep references to a minimum and cite sources only when they will directly contribute to exposition of the advice. A fully-documented companion volume, A Theory of Literate Action, examines the sources and theoretical reasoning behind the rhetoric and places its understanding of language, utterance, and writing within a wider social scientific understanding of humans, society, knowledge, communications, and literacy. While there is not a one-to-one match between the topics and chapters of the two books, the introduction of the companion volume identifies chapters where some of the ideas from the first volume are elaborated in the second.

I would like to thank the many people who over the years have responded to the emerging ideas expressed here. In particular I would like to thank Anis Bawarshi, Joshua Compton, Christiane Donahue, David Russell, Sandra Thompson, and the anonymous reviewers of the WAC Clearinghouse for their thoughtful readings and comments on draft chapters of both volumes. Finally I owe endless gratitude to my partner of over forty years, Shirley Geoklin Lim.

Chapter 1. Rhetorics of Speaking and Writing

Speech was born in human interaction. It coordinates activities (Lift . . . now), perceptions (Look at that bird), and knowledge of things not immediately perceivable (many fish are in the river in the next valley). It also leads people to modify their own behavior and/or states of mind on the basis of the procedures, perceptual categories, and knowledge first received or developed in social interaction. Further, speech articulates the categories by which people may be held socially accountable and provides the means by which people may give accounts of their actions (If I do this, what would I tell people?) Such realized potentials of language have proved of immense evolutionary advantage and have become key elements in our sociality and culture. By providing the means to create shared accounts of where we have been and where we are headed, it has made history and future culturally present. The beliefs, accounts, plans, and modes of social organization of oral cultures are cast into a different mode when writing enters.

Although speech and language go back to the beginning of human life, writing is generally thought to have been invented around 5000 years ago (Schmandt-Bessarat, 1992), simultaneous with the development of urban economies, larger political organizations, extensive religions, and many social institutions that have come to characterize the modern world (Goody, 1986).

Human language is built on interaction and activity in context and becomes meaningful and purposeful only in use. Internalized language as well originates in interpersonal interactions and has consequences for our internal self-regulation, using the culturally available categories and imperatives of language (Vygotsky, 1986). Our internal thoughts then reemerge, reformulated in processes of externalization to make ourselves intelligible to others (Mead 1934; Volosinov, 1973; Vygotsky, 1986). People regularly experience externalization as helping them know what they are thinking and clarifying what it is they think. Our later inventions that facilitate communication at a distance grow out of the same socio-cognitive resources and motivations as spoken language—whether fire signals or writing; whether cheap paper or computer screens; whether telegraphy, telephony, or the Internet; whether mail distribution systems or chat rooms; whether a tyrant’s stone tablets in the center of town or a commercial publishing industry. As the means and reach of communication change, our thinking, feeling, and motives may transform and grow in response to the new opportunities; our minds and societies are plastic and creative. But the creativity almost always is intertwined with our fundamental communicative capacities and orientations.

Thus to come to terms with writing and how to do it, we need to understand it both within the human capacity for language and in the social-cultural-historical conditions which have developed dialectically with our writing practices. Considering how we successfully manage to use language in face-to-face interaction will help us understand the challenges we must overcome in order to communicate when we are no longer in the same time and location to coordinate our meanings and actions with each other. In short, a fundamental problem in writing is to be able to understand and recreate the social circumstance and social interaction which the communication is part of, but which is obscured by the transmission of the words over time and space from one apparent set of social circumstances to another. We can understand much about writing if we understand how writing overcomes this difficulty, to help us locate our written communications in socio-cultural history, where written messages are coming from, and where they are going to.

Face-to-Face Speech

Face-to-Face speech, the condition within which language developed historically, occurs in a specific shared time and place. We speak to the people in front of us, as part of the events unfolding before us, in response to the comments we have just heard. We speak in the clothes we have worn that day and in the roles, statuses, and relationships we inhabit among those people we speak with. We see and feel all this in our bodies, viscerally. Seeing where we are, we react and speak. We say hello to a neighbor, good morning to a lover, and I’ll take care of that right now Ms. Johnson, immediately to our boss.

In these moments of immediate transactions we can make distant people and events imaginatively present by mentioning them. Remember Mr. Jawari? You know, Jackie’s teacher. Well, I saw him over at the mall yesterday . . . Or we can have distant unmentioned circumstances and relations in our minds, influencing how we talk and what we talk about. We may remember our parents telling us how to behave in public as we meet new neighbors. Our response to a sales pitch can be tempered by thinking about our vanishing bank account. Similarly our interlocutors name things they want to remind us of or show us for the first time. We may sometimes even guess (though not necessarily accurately) the urgencies and exigencies in their own life that stand behind their behavior and talk (Why are they mentioning this to me now?). But these non-present presences need to be evoked and mutually acknowledged in the conversation for them to be part of the meanings and activities realized in the here and now of talk (Sacks, 1995). That is, only when the child’s teacher or the empty bank account are mentioned and oriented to by the people talking together do they become a shared object of attention, a topic of conversation—otherwise they remain private individual orientations open only to speculation by our interlocutors about what was on our mind.

A central problem and task of spoken interaction is alignment within a shared communicative space. Alignment starts with the initiating task of gaining the attention of the one we wish to talk to and continues as people attend toward each other and what they may be conveying. People look at each other or stare toward the same point in space. Their bodies take mutually responsive postures—opening toward each other or backing away, arms folding in similar positions or gesturing into the space between. They also align to each other’s speech patterns—coordinating turns, adopting similar and coordinated rhythms and intonations, adjusting to each other’s accents and dialects (Chafe, 1994). Further, they align to each other’s meanings projected into the public space of talk. They take up common referents, themes, and knowledge introduced into the talk by prior speakers, they adopt mutually confirming assumptions (Sachs, 1995). They take what has been said as a given—both as meaning and action. Indeed, in the way they take up and use what has been said before they retrospectively interpret and create the continuing meaning of previous utterances.

Alignment is so crucial to the maintenance of conversation that people regularly and consistently repair the talk when they feel that there has been some breach that will disrupt the flow of talk, the social alignment of participants, or the mutual coordination of meanings (Schegloff et al., 1977). Unless the talk is repaired, the conversation can break and participants fall away. Such repairs may correct misunderstandings, such as who was being discussed, but can also involve backing away from something that was previously placed in the shared space of interaction. Saying something was only meant as a joke or is not really important indicates that what had been mentioned previously ought not to be attended to as the interaction moves forward.

Through alignment of speech activities, referents, interactional roles and relations, speech participants create a mutually recognized space of interaction, which has been called footing (Goffman, 1981) or frame (Goffman, 1974; Tannen, 1993). This footing goes beyond the recognition of the physical space and set of participants one is within to giving it a particular social characterization or shape. Thus by the change of posture or a few words one can reorient the attention of a group engaged in a political argument to a shared moment of satirical laughter, and then into a discussion of comics. Or if one person indicates by facial gesture that he hears another’s comments as an insult, all eyes focus on the social conflict and leave the substance of the discussion behind. This reorientation from one kind of scene to another is facilitated because we come to recognize patterned kinds of social scenes, interactions, and utterances. We see events as similar to other events and recognize them as of a kind, or genre.

The social understandings evoked in the speech-mediated framings can