The Limitations of Tradition

To understand the causes of the limitations, challenges, and the subsequent pseudo-rhetorical context of traditional writing instruction, we might start by thinking about the textual landscapes within which we ask our students to compose. As scholars suggest, technologies are changing the processes and practices by which we compose (Anson; Baron; Palmquist 2003, 2005; Porter; Thaiss). But if this is true, why have our pedagogies remained largely traditional in spite of the possibilities and influences of technologies? In "Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology," Anson contends, "if a mid-nineteenth century school teacher were . . . transported into a modern classroom, the teacher would feel quite at home" (264), suggesting that there is "little fundamental difference between the way we teach today and the way we did one hundred and fifty years ago" (Negroponte qtd. in Anson 264). He clarifies these statements, explaining that "the textual landscape of writing instruction has a long and stable history: students write or type on white paper of a standard size and turn in their work, adhering to various admonitions about the width of their margins and the placement of periphera such as names, dates, and staples. Teachers collect the papers, respond in predictable places (in the margins or in the spaces left at the end) and return the papers at the institutional site" (262). Anson's description of this "textual landscape" leads to several significant suggestions about current composition theory. Most interesting is the notion that we, as teachers, "collect...respond...and return the papers at the [same] institutional site[s]"; I might add, and rarely outside of these sites. But in light of new possibilities, what might be said of this fact? In other words, what do these insights—that writing occurs within the university walls and that it mainly appears within the confines of a white piece of paper (electronic or not)—tell us about our current teaching practices, and current rhetorical writing theory? What do these ideas tell our students about the writing process and the act of composing?

Furthermore, what does it mean for students’ understanding of writing when we ask them to compose in isolated confines of closed-source software such as the Word document, or on the white piece of paper? In asking this question, I hope to draw attention to the notion of "audience" within the rhetorical context of writing. As we know, the basic premise behind this notion is that each time writers engage in writing—the process and the act—there is a specific or particular audience for which the writing is situated. Students are expected to tailor and adapt their writing styles and conventions to meet audience needs, interests, and expectations. Unfortunately though, in the traditional classroom, student understanding of audience theory remains largely underdeveloped; in my experience, this concept remains nearly incomprehensible for some students.

As teachers, we recognize the problematic nature of asking our students to "imagine" their audience for purposes of invocation and of understanding the depth and complexity of the relationship that exists between these writers and their readers. Many first-year students have never composed for anyone other than themselves; many argue that the high school writing assignments they were asked to complete in the previous years were a-contextual. Their claims are the equivalent of arguing that their previous writing existed in a vacuum. To further complicate the notion of an “imagined” audience, we ask our students to write for this audience--engage them, persuade them, educate them—in traditional textual landscapes that remain disconnected from this audience, and then ask them to hand the teacher—us—this writing. I cannot tell a lie. I have fostered this same pseudo-rhetorical context for my students in previous semesters. For one of my assignments, I ask that they develop a letter, which they often compose in a Word document since it is the most acceptable and preferred landscape for them to compose in, in which they engage an audience of their choice--usually an individual--and then develop a critical discussion of one the many course readings. Like good students do, they write these letters and then hand them over to me, with their real audience far from sight and completely out of mind. On the post-scripts they complete, which offer them an opportunity to voice their triumphs, trials, and tribulations, they most often express a difficulty connecting to their "audience" (which I now place between the skepticism of apostrophes, a firm believer that the "imagined" audience was never an audience at all--it was simply something I paid lip-service to, or imagined myself, in my lectures on audience theory).

To further complicate the challenges associated with traditional writing instruction, we can consider the emphasis on dialogue as an essential aspect of the writing process--that is, that all forms of writing engage the writer and his or her audience in a dialogic relationship based on the exchange of ideas. Kenneth Bruffee, in his article "Collaborative Learning and the 'Conversation of Mankind,'" highlights the collaborative nature of this dialogic relationship between reader and writer. He states that "collaborative classroom group work...makes students aware that writing is a social artifact, like the thought that produces it" (423). Several pages later, still developing this idea, he claims that, ironically, in the context of writing classrooms, "what students do when working collaboratively on their writing is not write or edit. What they do is converse" (425). As a writer, I will be the first to acknowledge the value of conversation in the writing process. However, as a writing instructor, I am also aware that verbal conversation is not always the most effective method to engage students in collaborative learning. Bruffee's discussion is now dated, occurring during a time that preceded the development of the web, and more importantly, during a time that pre-dated the development of social networking applications like the Web 2.0 applications discussed in the next section. And in light of these developments his description of collaboration as it exists in terms of writing is now a narrow--partial--perspective of collaboration as it applies to writing. 

But we can still learn from Bruffee's analysis of the kind of collaborative dialogue that occurs in many traditional classrooms. First, we might accept that verbal collaborative classroom work—which he argues often neglects the act of writing—raises student awareness of writing as a social artifact (through reflective discussions), but also ask, "How effectively does it do this in light of new technologies?" Or “How else might we raise student awareness of writing as a social artifact?” Or even, “Why do so many of the collaborative efforts in 'traditional' writing classrooms depend on verbal discussion?” In posing this last question, I hope to reiterate the limitations of the traditional textual landscapes in which we compose. When peers engage in group workshops, their collaborative editing and revising processes are limited in that the writing being work-shopped resembles a "finished" product, an effect of the print culture. For instance, because their writing is contained within the printed landscape of the white paper (because they must bring in hardcopies for their peers to review), it is only open to "suggestions of change,"  which are often times manifested in chicken scratch down the margins or hidden within the text or in the spaces at the end of their papers. Therefore, a significant amount of substantive "suggestions" are rendered to verbal exchanges but lost in transit between the classroom and wherever the students tend to revise. If these suggestions are not lost, the students are left to "unpack" suggestions on their own, disconnected from the community of writers and readers that make up the classroom. All of these problematic issues allude to Bruffee's idea that sometimes "Writing may seem to be displaced in time and space from the rest of a writer's community of readers and other writers" (423), and I might add, are an effect—in part—of the traditional textual landscapes in which we compose.

But if we agree that these textual landscapes limit the collaborative process of writing in significant and sometimes problematic ways, then how might we overcome these limitations? In the next section entitled A Wikified Landscape and New Possibilities, I argue that the wiki, and its socially-inclined and technologically advanced textual landscape, offer one pedagogical possibility.