The Tennis Ball

A Class Activity About Language Use

Many metaphors exist to describe language and its use, but I want to explore a classroom activity that gets across one view about language--the tennis ball.

Activity:
Bring a tennis ball to class.
Start throwing it to students and having them throw it back to you or to each other.

What does this show or do? How is this a metaphor for language?

Throwing a tennis ball is a metaphor for what has been called the "transmission" model of communication. Another metaphor I have used is th UPS model of communication. Thought gets packaged and shipped from sender to receiver. The tennis ball is the thought which is sent between sender and receiver. The idea is that the thought is somehow static and real--it is a thing itself. It is an encapsulated form of reality. We wrap it in good language and then send it as clearly as we can. In this case how we throw the ball refers to how well we wrap this thought in language. Errors would equate to a mis-throw. The receiver or reader's job is to unpack or catch the ball. By catching the ball they are receiving that packaged ball of thought and reality. It is a one-to-one interchange ideally. The ball is unchanged and the reader/receiver's job is to catch it. They have to learn to be good catchers (close readers), though it is also the job of the writer/thrower to throw the ball well.

What is the relationship between reality and thought?
What is the relationship between thought or knowledge of reality and language?

To a large extent, we operate upon this Proficiency model of communication. This myth of immediacy, this transmission model. It rests on the idea that reality is out there as an objective presence AND that our language can capture this or equate to this reality. The alternative view, I think, is found in this one line: "Man is the measure of all things."

Next--an alternative metaphor for communication.

It still comes down to methodology

"Corresponding to theories in a field are methods of research and analysis, ways that a given discipline characteristically employs to study its chosen objects and topics. Method is in a sense the dynamic or processual counterpart to theory ... . Any comprehensive theory in composition studies implies a corresponding research method that defines a field of knowledge and the terms of a project for deriving knowledge about objects and events in that field." (Ann Wetherbee Phelps, Composition as a Human Science, p. 183)

I want to start with Phelps' contention that a "theory of composition" implies a research methodology. In my own search for a research methodology (how in the world am I going to study post-draft reflections?), I need to begin with my understanding of a "theory of composing." Phelps seems to imply that if you have the theory then BOOM you also have the research methodology. I'm not so sure.

My recent reading of Ann Bertoff's The Making of Meaning has been enormously helpful in thinking and rethinking about my theory of composition. I'm easily influenced by the scholars I read, but I find myself in full agreement with her notion of composing being a forming, shaping process--the making of meaning. It aligns with my notions of "constructionism" and writing and learning. I found a surprising echo of Berthoff in Phelps in this line: "The notion of writing as a discursive practice--the composing of meaning--becomes the abstract principle of reflection" (76). Without doubt, my own theories of composition and thus reflection are built on the discursive nature of writing, that language shapes and constitutes our understanding and interpretations.

Berthoff herself directly address the question of research methodology (or what she calls REsearch). She makes what I think is a startling statement: "The notion that 'research' can provide direction is absurd" (30). The absurdity comes from the equating of "basic research" in science fields like physics with research in education. In the hard sciences, basic research is needed to "advance" learning. However, Berthoff says that education is not comparable to the natural sciences. Here's here answer why: "Because education profoundly and essentially involves language--and language is not a natural process but a symbolic form and a social process" (31). Since we study language, we must adopt research methods appropriate to our subject. Phelps I believe says something similar in her book about how language as the subject of our study essentially distinguishes our type of research from the hard sciences. She states these methods as appropriate for composition studies: "I see composition as favoring hermeneutical and dramatistic methods of inquiry because it is primarily interested in the terms that make events and processes of literacy or reflection intelligible to their participants" (77). By these terms, I hear her saying qualitative methods would be more appropriate or fitting.

Berthoff makes an interesting statement that gives me an idea for a research project. She says, "if the questions and the answers [of research] are not continually RE-formulated by those who are working in the classroom, educational research is pointless" (31).

Study Design #3: Casting reflection to the winds
This study would not study any narrow practice of using reflection between drafts (as in specific prompts). This, in a way, is the problem with Beach's study of self-evaluations because it is a study of his particular use of self-evaluations in that one context. Instead, what if I were to formulate general principles and theories of rhetorical reflection, perhaps with some examples of use. If I then shared these principles and theories with teachers who would then adopt them into their classroom practice. They would follow the general principles but adapt them to their teaching context. These teachers would collect data and I would interview them and perhaps their students and study the students' work. I can forsee this being a kind of case study research design along the line of Hillocks study of different teachers teaching methods. What would be interesting is not just the "results" of their practice, but their customizing of this practice to their environment as well as their perceptions of their students results.

This study seems like a design more suitable to my subject. I sounds complicated to administer or manage however, and would I face the problem that these teachers practices might be to varied. How large would my sample need to be? Hmm...

I think that I need to go back to the starting point: What is my theory of composition? What is my theory of language? What is my theory of learning? What is my theory of knowledge? ...Then methodology will fall into place, right?

Research Thinking (again)

I've been re-reading my annotated bibliography of reflection research and begun thinking again about how I will research for my own dissertation. All the complicating factors of this research are a muddle in my mind, and I won't try and sort them out right now. The important thing is that I am thinking about this research again. How I define my own questions, goals, and context will determine a lot. I just want to feel out freely the possibilities for this research to see what seems interesting before I work within my box.

One of my goals for this January is to submit a preliminary preliminary dissertation proposal to my committee along with a preliminary book list. This will take a fair amount of work, but I want to get started on this now. Part of my problem in conceptualizing the dissertation project is that I conceive it as a research study. The dissertation is based upon the emperical study of some question. Hence, until I know what my research study will be then I don't know exactly what my dissertation will be focused upon. I know that it most likely will focus on reflective writing activities as a pedagogical technique. How far this teaching technique could be considered a "discursive tool" for the activity of writing is a big question (especially since it is not a "tool" commonly used by most writers). Can I write a dissertation in today's composition context that seems to focus on a teaching technique useful for a GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction) context?

I still come back to a number of key notions
--reflection has a mediating influence on learning and action
--reflection is the heuristic extension of invention within the activity of writing

From those two general assumptions flow my interest.

For now, I will chart out two research study ideas that I had while reviewing the bibliography and doing some recent reading. I'll add them to my list of research designs later:

Study idea #1: Could student self-evaluations/reflections index their growth as writers? Could students growth in meta-cognitive skill be charted over time, and could that growth be matched to their growth as writers? Could you examine a student's reflections over time to see if they indicated growth in writing?

This might be a longitudinal study tracking a student from Eng 0301 to 1301 to 1302 and perhaps even into Soph Lit. I don't like the idea of a longitudinal study for my diss (because of time), but it sounds like an interesting project. You could go down even further into high school or middle school, but it would be hard to get much of a sample over time. This study would be based to a degree upon the correlation between the ability to reflect productively with good writing performance. It would dig more deeply into this correlation to see how this correlation might be developed. The implication is that reflection has a role in good writing, so going back and starting with poor writers might unpack the place and influence of reflection in this writing development. This study would have the large task of validly and reliably measuring writing across time. Hmm...

Study idea #2: How does the influence and sticking power of post-draft reflections compare within an academic and non-academic writing environment? We "think" reflection benefits writers and their ability to revise within a school context--does that same benefit show up in a work-writing environment? Does reflection lead to "double-looping" in terms of learning and writing development?

I got this idea while reading Helen Foster's summary of some post-process critiques of General Writing Skill Instruction and writing process pedagogy in her book Networked Process. She brought up the question of how well the discursive tools we champion in school circulate outside of school. Well, if reflection is a discursive tool we champion that we could examine how it works in school and out of school and compare them.


That's it for now.

The Nutshell

Photobooth pic of me from my new iMac!!

I ordered Joseph Harris' new text Rewriting for my Freshman Comp II class next semester. It may be a far bit above their capabilitities, but it is an excellent text about academic writing and revision. The first four chapters of the book examine the four moves of "rewriting": coming to terms, forwarding, countering, and taking an approach. These are moves an academic writer makes as they write. He then uses these same concepts to present ideas for revision. The equivalence of these terms between "rewriting" and "revision" is not exact, and perhaps forced; however, Harris provides excellent advice on how to revise writing beyond mere editing. IN FACT, it seems that much of his approach to revision hinges on reflection or "between-the-draft" activities that are reflective in nature.

Here is his description of a "Project" on page 32: "The next time you complete a first draft of a writing project, see if you can write a paragraph or two in which you describe your essay as it then stands. Don't think of yourself as writing a new introduction to your essay. Rather, imagine your task as coming to terms with your own work, representing your essay to someone who hasn't read it. In this brief piece try to
--Define your aim in writing your draft.
--Comment on the present strengths and limits of your piece"

Later, in Chpt. 5, Harris elaborates on a similar assignment asking students to write an abstract of their essay and even a sentence outline (one sentence summaries of each paragraph) (109-110). Besides noting that this is an excellent example of "interpretive paraphrase" championed by Ann Berthoff (via I.A. Richards), the similarities of Harris' "between-the-draft" pedagogical activities to my own is striking. Harris provides some rationale to the student-reader for WHY these kinds of activities are beneficial: "Such reflective pieces can often be surprisingly hard to write. But that is why they are useful, since the difficulties you meet in trying to come to terms with a draft may point you toward work you need to do in revising it. ... In coming to terms with an early draft of a project, that is, you can begin to form a plan for revising it" (32-33). Unpacking these statements reveals the assumptions behind this pedagogical activity:
--that reflective writing like this "points" and "reveals": it is an activity where students gain the distance needed to SEE something about their draft and thinking that they might not otherwise have seen
--that reflective writing like this is epistemic (or "inventive") in that it helps students "begin to form": where students engage in the shaping and forming of their thinking
--that such an activity will have an impact on revision; that students who engage in this activity will revise better or know better what to do in revision that if they had not done the activity
--the ultimate assumption is that students will write better and produce better final writing pieces if they engage in this type of activity (that if they had not). WHY else do this activity if it would not be "useful?"

What is the nutshell of my dissertation focus?

It is the assumption of "usefulness" and what the "uses" are in this kind of between-the-draft reflective activity.

Commentary on Carolyn Miller's "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing"

ENGL5371-270
Dr. Kirk St. Amant
Commentary Article Assignment

Introduction

Something is not right in Carolyn Miller's 1979 groundbreaking and revolutionary article "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." Something is out of tune. As Patrick Moore points out, Miller's article is "probably the most important article in the 1970s and 1980s that tries to legitimate the teaching of technical communication in English departments" (171). Elizabeth Overman Smith's 1997 examination of "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing" identified 68 references or intertextual connections within academic journals between the years 1979 and 1995 to Miller's article. Various critics have identified what they see as the broader goals of Miller's article. Moore believes Miller seeks to "create cultural capital in her English Department for the languages of technical communication and technical communication pedagogy"(175). Smith believes Miller's real question is epistemological: "How is knowledge created and recorded?" (193). Thus, Miller is seen by many as "rescuing professional writing [and technical communication] from positivist views of language" (Rentz 187). I will grant the significant influence Miller's article has had for the academic discipline of technical communication.

But I am going to take Miller at her word. Her article is rhetorically situated within a controversy inside her English Department. Within a department meeting, the question is raised: "whether students in our larger technological university should be permitted to take a technical writing course to satisfy humanities requirements" (48). She goes on to refine the question further: "But were we willing to argue, indeed, could we argue that technical writing has humanistic value?" (48). Despite the fact that the real question of allowing the sophomore technical writing class to replace the required sophomore literature class was already decided in the negative at her university, she continues with the argument as a kind of fiction we are drawn into. Could we make this same case at our school? Could Miller's "humanistic rationale" truly convince her original audience--other English department colleagues as well as the Dean or other academic council members? I will answer "no." Miller actually misjudges her audience rhetorically and makes a failed case for a "humanistic" rationale for technical writing.

The Reception of Miller's Article

One of the first responses to Miller's article reveals the way Miller misjudges the meaning of "humanistic" for many scholars and teachers within technical communication and English studies. Elizabeth Tebeaux in her March 1980 response within College English to Miller's article is blunt in her dismay. She believes adoption of Miller's idea would ruin technical writing and "makes technical writing just another English course" (822). She considers Miller's article to be a "treatise on the rhetorical philosophy of technical writing" that says little about the primary purpose of the class: "to prepare [students] for the kind of writing they will have to do in business and industry" (822). She believes the pedagogy implied by the article is inappropriate for an undergraduate technical writing class and states flatly that technical writing is not a course in the "theory of composition" (823). It is Tebeaux's use of the word "enculturation"—a key word at the end of Miller's article—that demonstrates the misunderstanding between these two scholars. For Tebeaux, enculturation is seen through the lens of English studies and how it is meant within English classes. She clearly sees enculturation in opposition to pragmatic things: "These kinds of assignments—the real writing of the real industrial world—have little to do with enculturation" (824). Literature is described by Tebeaux as the "stronghold of enculturation" where students learn a "great deal about human nature and communal values" (825). Technical writing, in Tebeaux's world view, is about "preparing students to write for the changing world of work" (825). It is practical and pragmatic in its orientation, as opposed to Literature's orientation which is decidedly not practical. Tebeaux foresees English teachers teaching the sophomore technical writing requirement as if it were a literature course where technical writing texts would be the object of study and analysis.

In Carolyn Miller's response to Tebeaux's article (published in the same March 1980 College English), she quickly corrects Tebeaux's misunderstanding of what the course would be like: "[the technical writing course] is not, as Professor Tebeaux implies, a course in rhetorical theory or ethics. It is a writing course that is informed by rhetorical theory" (825). In Miller's eyes the course won't be a survey of "Great Works" in technical communication—it is still about writing. However, it is plain that Miller uses the term "enculturation" differently than Tebeaux understands it:

If Professor Tebeaux had understood the point of my original essay, she could not have said that "the real writing of the real industrial world [has] little to do with enculturation." The culture that technical writing students must become acquainted with consists of the values, aims, and methods of the professional community they intend to enter. (826)

Tebeaux still sees this debate as being about whether the required sophomore literature course could be replaced by a technical writing course, and she fears the "enculturation" typical of literature courses taking over what she sees as the greater need of pragmatic work on writing skills for this class. Elizabeth Harris astutely picks up on Tebeaux's understanding of theory as connoting impractical speculation: "She appears to assume that theory, by definition, (like English professors) must be irrelevant to 'the real world'" (828). Although Harris offers an alternative definition of theory that points out the usefulness of theory "organizing and explaining what has been observed," she correctly reads how Tebeaux receives the term "theory" as well as enculturation—each is seen from the liberal arts tradition of humanism within the academy (maintained most stanchly within English departments) which from Tebeaux's perspective is worlds apart from the practical matters of technical writing.

A second common reception of Miller's article reveals how those in the technical communication field narrowly interpreted the meaning of humanistic. Patrick Miller in his article "Legitimizing Technical Communication in English Departments: Carolyn Miller's 'Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing'" charts out the almost syllogistic way in which rhetoric becomes the bridge of legitimacy for technical communication:

One of Miller's most important moves is to rhetoricalize technical communication. If literature is rhetoric, and many people believe that it is, then when technical communication is defined as rhetoric, it gains capital from the long, documented history of rhetoric … . If technical communication is rhetoric, it fits better in humanistic English departments." (175)

The problem with this equation is that few literary critics consider literature to be rhetoric, and many would consider something deeply wrong if the rhetorical became the most important thing about literature. The crux of my point is not to denigrate rhetoric or the way in which Miller did "rhetoricalize" technical writing. The focus needs to remain upon that sophomore literature requirement—could we make a case that a technical writing class would provide equivalent humanistic capital to justify replacing this sophomore literature requirement? By positioning rhetoric as the thing that provides humanistic capital to technical writing, Miller misses entirely what is at the heart of this literature requirement the class is supposed to replace: the poetic.

A Failed Case

It is my position that Carolyn Miller makes a failed case to suppose that the rhetorical within technical writing provides enough cultural and historical capital to consider the class "humanistic" in the same sense as a literature class. She sorely misreads her literature counterparts and the liberal heart within the core curriculum which grew from John Cardinal Henry Newman's "Idea of a University."

As Sharon Crowley charts out, the modern study of English as a subject didn't even begin until 1870 (58). Adam Sherman Hill, the Bolyston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard from 1876-1904, in many ways defined the relationship of rhetoric to English and Freshman Writing that persists to today. As Crowley points out, Hill was not aligned with the rhetorical tradition Miller invokes: "[he was aligned] with the Arnoldian tradition of liberal humanism, a tradition distinguished from its classical ancestor by its diminution of the rhetorical impulse and its reverence for the maintenance of the cultural standards exemplified in a textual tradition" (62-63). But as Marilyn Schaurer Samuels points out, Arnoldian humanism was only the latest ancestor in a long line of anti-rhetorical impulses in western thought that led to the partition of science and the humanities (what Stanley Fish called the separation of fact and fiction). Samuels summarizes this history: "the unfortunate compartmentalization of science and the humanities [was] perpetrated by the universalist abstractions of Neoclassicism and the positivist generalities of eighteenth-century science and further fueled by the Romantics' defensive withdrawal into individual expression" (50). It was Ramus, afterall, in the mid-16^th century who split invention away from rhetoric and relegated rhetoric to issues of style. Evidence of Hill's truncated level of rhetorical sensibility can clearly be seen in his belief that the "foundations of rhetoric rest upon grammar" (qtd. in Crowley 63).

Elizabeth Harris in her own 1982 College English article, obviously intended to amplify Miller's humanistic rationale with a liberal arts twist, elaborates on this split between technical writing as a worldly, practical "language engineering" and literary criticism. Harris represents the view that "to perform dull writing tasks mechanically and thereby fit mindlessly into the institutions of industry and government… is a betrayal of the mission of literary criticism" (632). She points directly at Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" to articulate that mission:

to know the best that is known and thought in the world and by, in its turn, making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas… to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but … to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications. (qtd. in Harris 632)

The humanist tradition Arnold comes from has its roots in Plato and his belief in Truth (with a capital "T"), a realm of universal truths that is fixed and that we gain access to through contemplation and dialectic inquiry. Miller is obviously allied more with the Aristotelian tradition that relegates rhetoric to the realm of ideas and things that are uncertain and in flux. The liberal arts and humanism revered by Mathew Arnold that formed the center of English Studies looked to great texts as vessels of culture and value, of the great Platonic truths. And it was the power of the Poetic—not rhetoric—that communicated these truths. Crowley recounts James Morgan Hart's speech at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1884 where he condemns rhetoric:

Rhetoric always savors to me of the school-bench. It is, if we look into it scrutinizingly, little more than verbal jugglery. …The proper object of literary study, in one word, is to train us to read, to grasp an author's personality in all its bearings. And the less rhetoric here, the better. (qtd. in Crowley 83).

The philosophical romanticism of disinterestedness, the pose of the literary critic toward the world, represented a "distaste for popular or mass culture (Huyssen), but it can be read as a rejection of the rhetorical impulse as well" (Crowley 83). William Spanos believes this humanist impulse persists into our modern time: "modern humanism continually rehearses Arnold's gesture because humanists desire to establish a fixed center, a 'metaphysical space'" where the critic is in touch with these pure truths unbothered by worldly distraction (Crowley 84). "Enculturation," then, from this humanist tradition has little or nothing to do with rhetoric, but has everything to do with one's reading: "the ability to express oneself is the sign of the quality of one's reading, a sort of guarantee that one is acquainted with 'the best that has been thought and said,' to use Arnold's famous phrase. In this formulation the ability to express oneself is not as important as intellectual cultivation; it is the fact of being well-read that counts" (84). The subject matter of technical writing can hardly be considered as a substitute for "the best that has been thought and said."

An examination of one other critic's attempt to provide a humanistic rationale for technical writing will shed further light on Miller's failed case. Russell Rutter (in another article published in College English (1985) entitled "Poetry, Imagination, and Technical Writing") presents the poetic rationale for technical writing that Miller perhaps could have adopted. If the audience of English scholars is adverse to rhetoric, one might think that a firmer case can be made on poetic grounds. Rutter argues that technical writing, too, is an "imaginative, creative, and thus poetic endeavor" (700). The technical writer, in his view, works at "shaping and synthesizing the inchoate stuff of experience into reports designed to inform and enlighten and identified audience, and thus [he is] engaging in a fundamentally poetic process" (705). However, this argument is flawed on two grounds. Rutter himself states the first problem in his argument: "Literary study does not, of course, teach us how to create good poems, but it shows us that people who have created good poems have relied on something more than the transcription of raw data—intuition, imagination, selection, shaping, and so on" (699). The fundamental flaw in Rutter's argument is that literary study is about reading, while technical writing is about writing. One focuses more on the interpretation of great texts; the other focuses on the production of efficient and usable documents. To follow Rutter's argument, then, the sophomore creative writing class would be sufficient to replace the required sophomore literature class (which has not happened anywhere to my knowledge). Joseph Harris in a response to Rutter's article points out the second flaw in Rutter's humanistic rationale for technical writing: "I agree with Rutter that tech writing, like all writing, is at heart creative. But I don't see how that alone makes it particularly poetic" (741). Great literature deals with the deepest truths about the human spirit and human experience: as the "poetic," it touches Truth in a universal, Platonic sense. While science may also deal with truth, this truth does not rise to the same level as the humanist truths contained in literature since these truths concern physical matter—not the human spirit.

Final Considerations

By appealing to rhetoric as the humanistic agent to give value to technical writing, Carolyn Miller appeals to a warrant that her English department colleagues would neither understand or be swayed by. Indeed, the entire framing of her argument as a fictional debate within her English Department seems tacked on. We see her mention her department debate only in the first two paragraphs at the beginning and the last paragraph at the end. However, this close examination of Miller's failed rhetoric toward her fictional audience shed's light on the rhetorical genius of the piece toward her real audience.

It seems clear that Miller's real audience is not fellow English literature teachers in her department, nor is the real issue about whether to replace the sophomore literature requirement with a technical writing class. Her real audience is other technical writing instructors and scholars. English Studies and technical writing represented something akin to two different political parties. By invoking the contested dynamic between English studies and technical communication, she rallies those in her "party" behind a cause everyone in technical communication could agree on—gain equal (or superior) status as the other "party" (English Studies. Once she has gained her audiences alliance in this "fight," she proceeds to detail her version of technical communication's true nature as a "humanistic"¹ endeavor by linking it to the 2500 year old rhetorical tradition and postmodern epistemological thinking--and in this fight, she wins and transforms how technical communication sees itself.

Notes Page

1. Miller may in fact be taking "humanistic" as a term from the field of Speech Communication which uses it to refer to the rhetorical aspects of its field of study (social-scientific being the other). In this way, she may be attempting to infuse notions of rhetoric taken from Speech Communication into technical communication.

Works Cited

Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemic Essays. Pittsburg:

University of Pittsburg Press, 1998.

Harris, Elizabeth. "Elizabeth Harris Responds:" College English. 41.7 (1980): 827-829. JSTOR.

San Antonio College Lib., San Antonio, Texas. 5 November 2007.

---. "In Defense of the Liberal-Arts Approach to Technical Writing." College English. 44.6

(1982): 628-636. JSTOR. San Antonio College Lib., San Antonio, Texas. 5 November 2007.

Harris, Joseph. "A Comment on 'Poetry, Imagination and Technical Writing.'" College English.

48.7 (1986): 741-742. JSTOR. San Antonio College Lib., San Antonio, Texas. 5 November 2007.

Miller, Carolyn. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English. 40.6 (1979):

610-617. Central Works in Technical Communication. Eds. Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 47-54.

---. "Carolyn Miller Responds." College English. 41.7 (1980): 825-827. JSTOR. San Antonio

College Lib., San Antonio, Texas. 5 November 2007.

Moore, Patrick. "Legitimizing Technical Communication in English Departments: Carolyn

Miller's 'Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.'" Journal of Technical Writing & Communication. 36.2 (2006): 167-182.

Newman, John Henry Cardinal. "The Idea of a University." Victorian Prose and Poetry. Eds.

Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. 126-131.

Rentz, Kathryn. "A Flare from the Margins: The Place of Professional Writing in English

Departments." Pedagogy. 1 (2001): 185-190. 5 November 2007 .

Rutter, Russell. "Poetry, Imagination, and Technical Writing." College English. 47.7 (1985):

698-712. JSTOR. San Antonio College Lib., San Antonio, Texas. 5 November 2007.

Samuels, Marilyn Schauer. "Is Technical Communication 'Literature'? Current Scholarship and

Vico's Cycles of Knowledge." Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 1.1

(1987): 48-67.

Smith, Elizabeth Overman. "Intertextual Connections to 'A Humanistic Rationale for Technical

Writing.'" Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 11.2 (1997): 192-222.

Tebeaux, Elizabeth. "Let's Not Ruin Technical Writing, Too: A Comment on the Essays of

Carolyn Miller and Elizabeth Harris." College English. 41.7 (1980): 822-825. JSTOR.

San Antonio College Lib., San Antonio, Texas. 5 November 2007.

2007 TYCA-SW Conference Presentation

Becoming More Hospitable to Rhetoric: The Rhetorical Forum as a Heuristic Toward a New Composition

--see handout for presentation

Formative Reflection in Technical Communications

Formal Assignment #2 (Engl5371):

Magazine Article for Intercom Magazine

Supercharge the Results of Usability Testing with Formative Reflection

Having information is not enough? It's what we do with that information that matters. As we saw from our government's intelligence shortcomings pre-9/11, we might have a host of data, but this data is useless unless we "connect the dots" and pull together a comprehensive understanding of its meaning. As technical communicators who follow principles of User-Centered Design (UCD) and Information Development, we engage early and often in usability testing, generating substantial amounts of data and analysis. The iterative testing and design process requires us continually to make sense of these results of iterative tests to move our design efforts forward. This article proposes a technique called "Formative Reflection" to help the information design process.

What is Formative Reflection?

Formative Reflection is a strategic technique for assessing the results from usability testing within an iterative design process. Useful for low-fidelity to high fidelity prototypes, Formative Reflection's purpose is to assist technical communicators and information designers make sense of iterative testing in order to formulate new directions for design improvements. This technique is most productively done as an act of writing, though it can be done verbally. It prompts technical communicators to pull together past, present, and future in their deliberations. It is helpful in conceptualizing problems and helping technical communicators and designers check their thinking so that they can more productively move forward in the iterative design process. Formative Reflection is particularly effective when applied to the assessment and design of what Janice Redish calls "complex information analysis" that involves open-ended, complex problems.

How Does It Differ From Formative Evaluation?

Whereas Formative Evaluation seeks to present data and provide analysis derived from usability testing or other forms of review, Formative Reflection goes beyond just analysis to consider the implications of testing results. Formative Evaluation is something like the ill-fated daily briefing presented to the President on August 6, 2001 titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” It presents facts, an assessment, and perhaps recommendations. Its goal is to assist decision-makers. However, Formative Evaluation doesn't make the decisions. Formative Reflection's purpose is to engage information designers in an activity that helps them pull together all the disparate facts and information—knowledge often outside of the scope of the actual Formative Evaluation report—and come to conclusions about how best to proceed.

When Is It Best To Use Formative Reflection?

Formative Reflection borrows ideas about professional practice and learning theory from Donald Schon, David Kolb, and John Dewey. For each of these theorists, reflection plays a key role in learning and informing action.

Donald Schon (1983, 1987) is best known for his ideas of "reflection-in-action" and "reflection-on-action" in professional practice. He points out the shortcomings of what he calls "technical rationality" and the narrow application of scientific rules and principles in our work. He contrasts the high ground of how things ought to be (based upon research-based theory and technique) and the swampy lowlands of how things really are—messy, confused, and unique. When a problematic situation presents itself as a unique case, it often falls outside the professional's current knowledge and techniques. It's not "in the book." Schon calls the inability to deal with the gap between this form of textbook, scientific knowledge and our understanding of particular situations a crisis in professional knowledge. He says that if the professional practitioner is to deal with a unique situation competently, "she must do so by a kind of improvisation, inventing and testing in the situation strategies of her own devising." Reflection, Schon thinks, helps bridge this gap through a kind of translation process between general rules and particular situations that makes technical problem-solving possible.

The iterative design process has many similarities to what David Kolb has called the "Experiential Learning Cycle." The cycle of User-Centered Design can be represented broadly in this way:

Figure 1: The iterative usability testing cycle.

Just as in the UCD iterative testing process the improvements in design depend upon the frequency and quality of these user tests, in the Experiential Learning cycle Kolb believes that the progress in learning from experience depends upon the quality of the reflective observation. It is from this analytic and detached position that a learner creates a broader understanding of the experience and formulates a new way of approaching it for another attempt.

Figure 2: A simplified version of the experiential learning cycle (Kolb, 1984).

Translating Kolb's view on the cycle into UCD terms, the cycle might look something like this:

Figure 3: A revised version of the Experiential Learning Cycle for User-Centered Design

Each usability test represents an experience from which the designer must learn. It is the application of Formative Reflection that assists the technical communicator and information designer form the important insights and understandings necessary to move the design process forward successfully.

Formative Reflection, however, may not be necessary in every iterative design cycle. If Schon points out how reflection helps us apply general principles within particular contexts, and Kolb describes how reflection helps us stand back and learn from experience, John Dewey highlights the special purpose of reflection—to address perplexity. It is within a situation of doubt, uncertainty, or difficulty where reflection's special role comes into play. Dewey (1933) described reflection as a special form of thinking where we consider a belief or knowledge, but also evaluate the basis for that belief or knowledge and the conclusions to which it leads. A sense of doubt or perplexity is what triggers the reflection process and drives it. Through this focused examination of where they have been, where they are, and where they might or need to go, reflective thinkers are led to insights that can transform or confirm their stance within the development process.

For technical communicators and information designers that means Formative Reflection can be a methodology employed when what to do based upon usability testing is unclear. If we think of the iterative design process as a spiral-shaped road that leads forward from concept to final product or document, Formative Reflection is applied within instances when a tree has blocked that road or the road suddenly comes to a place where it branches in five directions. Formative Reflection can be a way of problem-solving out of set-backs when usability testing has produced particularly disappointing results. It can help us make the right choice when we have multiple possible paths to pursue in development.

How to Do Formative Reflection

Applying Formative Reflection should be a flexible procedure that adapts to the particular needs of a situation where technical communicators face this perplexity in their design process. However, I would like to outline some general guidelines for how you might use this methodology in your design practice.

Do it in writing!

Many companies may employ a verbal approach to evaluating the implications of usability testing by gathering in meetings to discuss findings, but Formative Reflection should be done in writing (at least at first). But why writing? Many theorists of reflection, particularly Max Van Manen, see the particular value of reflection coming from its power to distance a person from events so that they can be viewed in a more objective manner. Writing by its nature gives this kind of distance. Elliot Eisner also sees writing as important for our learning because how we represent what we know actually shapes what we know. The idea is that we come to insights and understandings as we write. It may be awkward within a work environment not used to this kind of silent activity, but Formative Reflection should be seen as a technique applied when needed just as Card Stacking or Affinity Diagramming is used when necessary. Just as these are strategic activities conducted in particular ways to help achieve a particular end, Formative Reflection works the same way—in writing.

Open-Ended Formative Reflection


One approach to Formative Reflection is to conduct an open-ended reflection without a strict prompt. Particularly in instances early in the iterative development cycle, this open form of reflection will promote innovative thinking and problem-solving. Below are two examples of open-ended Formative Reflection prompts:

What are your thoughts on the usability test report and where we need to go from here?

What's working? What's not? Why? Where do we go from here?

Structured Formative Reflection

Structured Reflection has been used in Nursing to help nurses learn from incidents they encounter as they work. It entails filling out a fairly detailed form asking them to evaluate and think about a clinical incident. The usefulness of a Structured Formative Reflection is that you can include specific questions pertaining to the particular development process you are engaged within.

I would like, however, to offer two general frameworks for a more structured Formative Reflection. The first comes from David Boud, a theorists on reflective learning in the workplace. He presents four key elements to consider when re-evaluating experience:

1. association—How does the new data relate to that which is already known?

2. integration—What relationships are apparent within the data?

3. validation—What is authentic? What can be confirmed and what can be negated?

4. appropriation—What understandings and insights do I have?

Another structure for a more detailed form of Formative Reflection comes from the ideas of Jack Mezirow, a theorist in Adult Learning. He sees reflection as taking three different forms: content reflection, process reflection, and premise reflection. Content reflection would be similar to the focus on the data and what its implications are found in Boud's four elements. Process reflection, however, adds the important element of design activity and sequence. The affect of product design can be as impacted by process as by bad design, and the entire design enterprise entails a large scale coordination of personnel and resources. Premise reflection can be the hardest, but most important focus to have while doing reflection. Within premise reflection, you play the devils advocate and question beliefs or procedures that you take for granted. Mezirow believes that it is only through this deeper form of premise reflection that transformations occur. Arriving at such a badly needed change or perspective or course of action could make a significant difference for the entire information design process.

Collaborative Formative Reflection

Most technical communicators work within a team, so we need to consider how this kind of Formative Reflection could work within a collaborative context. One scenario has the entire team in a meeting room discussing a usability report or other form of review. At either a pre-determined point (say after the report has been fully discussed), or at a point where there is particular confusion and lack of consensus within the team, Formative Reflection is used as a technique to help the group come to conclusions and consensus. After the group writes, they share the results of their written reflection out loud. Another interesting approach would be to share the usability testing report with the entire team electronically before a meeting. Team members would do a Formative Reflection and post this writing piece electronically to the entire group. The team could then consider each individual member's Formative Reflection before the meeting, thereby making the team meeting more productive. Through this technique of reviewing the Formative Reflections of others, the benefits of reflection become magnified even further.

Breaking Out of the Straightjacket of Rules

As technical communicators working within contexts dominated by scientific and technical thinking, we may have a tendency to latch on to technical rules of information design development that become formulaic. If it worked once, it will work the same way the next time. If it is described and used by So and So Expert, we seek to imitate them exactly. We all need this kind of guidance for our work. However, viewing these practices as technical rules that predetermine our design can have dangerous results, particularly in instances when our design process faces problems and uncertainty. If we are not able to problem-solve creatively and fully comprehend the implications of usability test results, we could be drawn into creating flawed products. Formative Reflection is one technique that can help technical communicators address perplexity and mediate between the technical rules and universals that guide their practice and the requirements of the particular communication context. Only with this nimbleness of mind and willingness to go beyond the rules when necessary can we produce truly innovative and successful designs and products—Formative Reflection helps us accomplish this goal.

References for further inquiry

Boud, David. Productive Reflection at Work: Learning for Changing Organizations.
London: Routledge, 2006
--. Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning. London: Kogan Page, 1985.

Moon, Jennifer A. Reflection in Learning & Professional Development. London: Kogan Page, 2000.

Schon, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books, 1983.