Bazerman

Bazerman argues that any investigation into writing requires a interdisciplinary approach, including such fields as sociology, philosophy, history, psychology, linguistics. Such a inclusive approach contextualizes writing within the larger framework of meanings in which the writing serves as significant activity. Scientific writing does not simply happen, i.e. the recording of facts; rather it is a rhetorical accomplishment that contributes to knowledge.

Bazerman wants to know what a text does, how it does it, and where it does it. To do so, he examines the rhetoric of genre, specifically the experimental report which has "developed as a favored solution of the problem of how to present empirical experience as more than brute fact, as a mediated statement of inquiry and knowledge" (504). That is, the experimental report has achieved institutional force because it has addressed successfully the rhetorical problems that scientists confront. However, Bazerman notes that genres are not panacea that students can follow slavishly; rather, students "must understand and rethink the rhetorical choices embedded in each generic habit to master the genre" (8). Students must understand how writing works; as Bazerman states, "Writing is choice making, the evaluation of options" (507). The more students understand, the more they will be able to control their writing and make intelligently persuasive choices. They become better writers.

The problem, I think is convincing future scientists, engineers, etc. to think of themselves as writers and communicators. Ostensibly, this is why we have Writing in the Sciences. We can help them develop a praxis of rhetorical activity. As Bazerman points out in a later chapter, they do not need to know everything about rhetoric; they just need to know enough to know when they might need help with their writing.

Gee

James Paul Gee places New Literacy Studies as one movement among many in the larger social turn of the 80s and 90s, reporting its stance on reading and writing as sensible only "when studied in the context of social and cultural (and we can add historical, political, and economic) practices of which they are but a part" (1293).

Gee gives brief descriptions of thirteen other movements that comprised this social turn. He notes that many, including himself, assumed the social turn was inherently progressive even though some movements didn’t openly discuss politics (1296). It seems that old capitalism had no use for collective or social thinking: solated individuals are easier to control; modern globalization, however, has fostered the development of niche markets catering to particular "consumer identities and values," which is "heavily social and contextual and semiotic" work (1297). 

The workers, then, must not be the rigid cogs with specific, narrow knowledge that dominated early industrialism but easily retrainable knowledgeable of the "big picture," able to work collaboratively, and think innovatively (1298). 

That does not mean, however, that individual workers are more valuable now than in a 1920s Ford factory because no one of them has specialized knowledge or skills, leaving them essentially no more secure under the new capitalism. The values and methods of the social turn movements are readily "recruited" into the practice of new capitalism, with its focus on constructed identity and change. In response to this, Gee wants to make "enactive and recognition work" the center of New Literacy Studies: that is, our attempts to make others recognize things as particularly meaningful in certain situations and configurations. Individuals help create and uphold these configurations (1302), and by working within and outside of these configurations, we can both adapt to and alter their recognition (which differs by interpretive perspective anyway); in a pragmatic example, Gee mentions the work “to get 'local literacies' recognized as 'literacy'" by changing how that particular configuration was recognized (1304).

Gee argues that even the social movements are susceptible to capitalism, albeit a new form of it. His solution, if I understand it, is: “one way we can analyze people, words, and deeds is to task what they seek to project into the world, what political projects they implicate” (1303). Though I recognize that Gee is addressing a new type of capitalism, the similarities he draws to the old model make me question how new this "new" capitalism is, at least as it applies to us.

To Err Is Human

Williams argues that writing instructors should rethink their definition of error in student's papers. In an attempt to prove his point, he, without warning, included 100 grammer errors in his essay challenging his readers to list the errors they noticed on first reading it. He maintains that, because he is a professional writer whose relationship to his readers is quite different from the teacher-student relationship, many of the errors in his article have gone undetected. Clever Williams. He has in essence proven that we read the writing of our colleagues differently than we do student writing and that error is not a fixed feature of a text but something constructed by the reader.

But that trick, nor his exposure of grammarians making the very mistakes they admonish against, is not half so clever as his definition of error as a social phenomenon. Williams claims that error is a "flawed verbal transaction between a writer and a reader" (417). He warns the reader against conceiving error as "a discrete entity, frozen at the moment of its commission" (417), such as might be suggested by a tabulation of 432 comma splices "in so many pages or words of student writing.

Williams problematizes such empirical research on the grounds that "[m]erely by being asked, it becomes manifest to [researchers] that they have been invested with an institutional responsibility" to uphold a certain "standard" (418). By throwing the light of the "expert" back on itself, Williams exposes some of the unstated political assumptions behind the statistical measurements of error. He frees up space for the reader, and the pedagogue, to widen the scope.

He talks about "errors" in everyday social life, comically contrasting them with "grammatical" indecencies such as split infinitives or dangling modifiers: "We break wind at a dinner party and then vomit on the person next to us. We spill coffee in their lap, then step on a toe when we get up to apologize. … Or the error metaphorically violates psychic space: We utter an inappropriate obscenity, mention our painful hemorrhoids, tell a racist joke, and snigger at the fat woman across the table who turns out to be our hostess" (419-20).

Dramatizing the concept of "error" in commonplace situations gives the reader as a broad a starting point for error as she or he is likely to find, beyond the freshman or "basic writing" classroom, but, one might argue, analogously applicable to it.

Williams has demonstrated that we are likely to find errors where we look for them, that our reading of professional prose is happily oblivious to error whereas the reading of our students' prose is hard-nosed and scrutinizing.

Photo: Kendell Geers T:error