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My research discovered that rhetorical reflection involves comparison, assessment, and judgment made in terms of a writer’s conception of “essay success.” What is considered and gleaned from feedback, the identification and framing of problems, the understandings generated as well as the plans made for revision all depend on the writer’s concept of what constitutes essay success.
The concept of essay success closely resembles Hayes’s idea of task schema because it likewise serves as a controlling factor for the entire dynamic of reflective thinking within rhetorical reflection. If as Higgins, Flower, and Petraglia believe true reflection involves critical evaluation, the grounded theory of rhetorical reflection says that this evaluation starts with a comparison between the “real text/writer” (that is, the actual text on the page or activities performed by the writer) and the ideal text/writer (the ideal of what the text should be or the activities performed by the writer should be). The essential double-movement or dialectic of rhetorical reflection involves this comparison within the writer’s mind between the real and the ideal text/writer, as the following graphic illustrates:
The diagram also portrays the important place of feedback in providing the writer with an outside representation of the real and ideal text/writer for consideration.
Within rhetorical reflection, writers constantly interpret, transform, and confirm their conceptions of the real and ideal text/writer. Although essay success equates to the ideal text/writer, the concept of essay success differs because it represents the practical and tangible expression of the ideal text/writer in actual writing. Essay success is the closest alignment writers can manage between the real text/writer and the ideal/text writer—acknowledging that the real never matches absolutely the ideal. Despite Knoblauch and Brannon’s critique of the “Ideal Text” as reductive and an expression of teacher authority, this idealized conception of the text need not be either fixed or in the sole possession of the teacher (120). As the diagram below illustrates, aspects of essay success are multiple and exist along a spectrum from being fixed and definite to more various and contingent:
For instance, task requirements such as page length or the requirement to incorporate quotes from research constitute fixed aspects of essay success for that particular assignment. Standard conventions for the use of punctuation or documentation are similarly more certain characteristics of essay success. However, how to create an engaging opener for the essay or how to provide adequate and convincing support are much less definite and abstract. The contingent side of essay success is open to a greater variety of options and is subject to context to determine appropriateness and success.
Wherever the concept of essay success may fall within writers’ thinking, it exists as a kind of measuring stick against which writers make the comparisons, assessments, and judgments that constitute the reflective thinking of rhetorical reflection. Any knowledge generated or validated within these reflective writings originates from the writer’s representation of essay success. Also, the assessments and judgments that occur within these reflections are based upon this concept of success or failure, and writers constantly orient themselves toward this goal of essay success and try to move in its direction (similar to McAlpine’s et al.’s model). A problem in the text won’t be acknowledged as a problem unless it is seen to be out of alignment with writers’ understanding of the ideal text; likewise, a plan for revision won’t be considered or devised and accepted unless it is moving the real text toward essay success. Resembling the notion of to prepon from classical rhetoric, “fitting-in-bounds” is the term that describes this reflective thinking made in terms of essay success.
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