They begin their textbook, which I did not realize was a textbook, discussing why college freshmen who are inexperienced writers do not go through the entire writing process. They focus on two reasons. One reason they label as "alienation" to describe the disconnectedness of the classroom assignment from a real writing situation. The writing is only a game played by the professor's rules, and these rules seem arbitrary and incomprehensible. The student puts little investment in real communication because it is a silly game they are forced to play to get a grade. As long as writing is a school activity, this first hindrance to writing is hard to overcome completely.
The second reason, though, is interesting to me given my focus on rhetorical reflection. I will quote a part of their text:
"For some reason, they [students] don't seem obsessed by the need to write successive drafts. Why is this so?
" Inexperienced writers, we believe, don't go through the writing process because they haven't learned to pose for themselves the same kinds of problems that experienced writers pose. ... they have not learned how to 'problematize' their experience" (4).
The entire writing process involves problems and choices, and the awareness of some standard or criteria for what is working or not working, right or wrong, that then defines when something is problematic. I've tagged this standard for the writing classroom as the "idea of essay success" and the "ideal text/writer." Part of why I believe Writing Reviews and rhetorical reflection have value is because it engages students in this thinking about their writing and prompts them to work through the problems and choices of writing as a way to develop a "habit of mind." The practice of Writing Reviews as a way of prompting rhetorical reflection "poses" for inexperienced writers some of the kinds of problems that experienced writers pose.
Hopefully, it would help develop unaided and unprompted habits of rhetorical reflection for writers as they become more experienced. This capacity for unprompted rhetorical reflection would constitute transfer.
I look forward to learning from Ramage and Bean.
Before I leave today's post, I want to bring up one other point they discuss and relate it to something I was reading in Troy's book. While defining their understanding of the book's chief concepts--form and surprise--they use the law of thermodynamic as a metaphor to describe surprise in writing. Basically, this law says that the greater the degree of temperature difference, the greater the amount of energy transferred. They say, "Writers aiming for 'surprise' in their essays might imagine themselves conveying energy (the writer's view of a topic) across a gap to a reader existing at a different temperature (a different view of the topic)" (16). As I begin working on my general article on rhetorical reflection, I feel that I can certainly build on the "temperature" difference that lies between the typical way of viewing reflection and that or rhetorical reflection. I saw more evidence of curricular reflection in the description of Dawn Reed's curriculum for creating a podcast in Troy's book. Included at the end of the six page curriculum description is an assignment titled, "This I Believe Informative Speech and Podcasting Reflection." The prompt for the written reflective piece starts this way: "Compose a one-page-minimum typed reflection explaining what you learned from the This I Believe podcasting project" (71). There it is--post-task reflection designed to promote constructivist learning within a context of evaluation. I feel that the "temperature" difference between the common portfolio-centric view of reflection and that of rhetorical reflection is fairly large. Hence, I believe my article can build on a strong element of surprise.
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