20: “1. Invention”
21: “Writers who learn how to let the what help them discover the how are learning the use of limits.” ***Here Berthoff writes of “constraints” that work when writers consider audience (“What does the reader need to know?”) and the form (genre in this passage). Constraints here are means of invention, “form” as heuristic (and situation as heuristic). IN order for this to work, students need to develop awareness of audience and form (different from discourse community? genre expectations? )
21: “2. Specification”
21: “Frequently students are told not to generalize, but what is meant is that they should not do so without making clear the grounds for generalizing. A writer continually moves back and forth between examples and particular cases and general ideas by specifying, saying what kinds and classes are involved.” ***This articulates what the non-linear process looks like. “Concept formation…is in progress throughout the entire composing process. (That’s why writing is a way of thinking.)”
21: “3: Developing and deploying syntactical resources”
21: “For many reasons that are important for English teachers to understand, modern culture does not foster literacy.” ***How does she define “literacy”? Must admit at this point I don’t know. Perhaps it’s an awareness of “how we construct and construe”… The conscious control of this process, agency.??? Well… given the title of this section… Here is where AB and I differ. She’s speaking in a context of SAE, I think. Though I’d guess her advice could be used to study or “glean” or develop a body memory for certain “syntactical structures” would apply to that of any language system. “The challenge is first of all to teach our students to listen, a skill that sometimes has to be relearned in medical and law schools [that have their own syntactical patters].” **THis section is problematic, too, in its referencing of “maturity”…
22: “4: Revising and editing”
“The means of achieving ‘cohesion’ can be taught as a way of understanding interaciton of thinking and writing.”
“Perhaps the most difficult aspect of teaching writing as process and of considering the result as something that is nurtured and brought along, not mechanically produced, is that our students do not like uncertainty (who does?); they find it hard to tolerate ambiguity and are tempted to what psychologists call ‘premature closure.’ They want the writing to be over and done with; unfortunately, much composition teaching encourages those feelings. We can encourage our students, instead, in learning techniques of revision only if we forgo treating false starts, unfruitful beginnings, contradictions, and dead ends as mistakes, and see them, rather, as tentative steps, stages in a process.” ***We must reward, I think, all the work that goes into producing that end product. Thus my points system. Thus the portfolio system. How does digital composing inform this appreciation for non-linear process?
22: “Composing involves the writer in making choices all along hte way and thus has social and political implications: we aren’t free unless we know how to choose.” ***And we can’t do that unless we know we CAN choose and understand what our choices are! “Teaching composition as a process can put students in touch with their own minds; it can give them back their language. It is not too much to claim that the composition classroom is a place where students can discover their humanity in both a moral and political sense.” **Freire. So how is this different from “process” a la Harris? Or expressivism?
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