Who am I this time?:Morgan at Biro

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Discuss what you know about audience (that is, what you've been taught) - and how you teach it - how you think about it -

These are the ideas Ong and L&E are getting at: We need to theorize it, bring how we think about it out in the open, in order to teach it - in order to figure out if it's worth teaching, and if it is, where does it fit in our teaching.

And what else do we teach when we teach about audience? how to be one? how to move one? how to ignore it?

Consider what conception(s) audience we teach and how we teach that - either openly or as implied:

demographics? psychological profiles? interviews?
do we teach audience indirectly - invoked by teaching textual and argumentative conventions such as fallacies and appropriate use of evidence? "appropriate" aligns with audience invoked -
do we not teach audience overtly at all? (We will teach about audience indirectly when we teach anything about writing). Why would we ignore audience? Why would we suggest student writers ignore audience?

Consider: How might we teach audience if we're Ong? Lessons? Samples to read? Group work to do?

Take 5 - 7 mins to brainstorm a few, then we'll critique with Ong in mind.

Does this conception of audience help us make compositional sense of some student texts?

That is, what can we say about a student text using this sense of audience?

The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction

Walter Ong

Classic work, from MLA instead of CCC, in which he describes a dynamic of writer to reader and back again.

The writer must “construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role . . .” and that this same audience must “correspondingly fictionalize itself”.

This is to say that the writer and the implied audience are representations constructed by writer and audience respectively, using the text.

The reader is not one of a crowd, as an audience, but an individual isolated. We see in evolution of narrative and the novel a evolution of audience role-casting. From Chaucer to Tom Jones to Jane Austin. Readers have to come to learn the roles they are cast in, and that can developed historically and individually by way of education. We learn to read as a reader of Stearn, et al.

Uses fictional narrative as a model for considering the writer - reader relation in a non-fictional text.

As an example of how the role works in a rhetorical relationship. What is interesting is determined rhetorically. It doesn't just exist. For Ong, what is interesting and significant in a history text is a result of the role the writer casts for the reader - and w it the relationship the writer seeks to establish for the reader. P 70. We can see this in operation on web pages, syllabi, etc.

Consider this dynamic in the rhet sit of the classroom: the student writer constructs you as a teacher-audience - and you him, according to the instructions given in the text.

In the end, Ong comes to acknowledge that writing is mediation. Writing is indirection. Direct communication by writing is impossible. Writing will never bring us to actuality.

Compare Ong's conception of audience - writer relation in relation to those commonly taught.

bring in the diagram from Longaker. This posits an implied writer / reader, which is Ong's take from a different angle.

Examples

A passage from Tristram Shandy
A short brief from online gossip. we get a sense of invoked when the role is a little distant.

Common conception of audience is receiver - passive, decoding the message being sent. The old positivistic model of language. Doesn't work like that.

Ong's take also prompts us to reconsider style. That is, to look at some stylistic features as signals of how the audience is to play her role.

Writer picks up a voice - a style - and with it, a pre-made audience. As in memo style, recipe style, Hemingway style, etc

Ong uses fiction to make his point, but this fictionalization occurs in any writing: writer constructs an audience implicit in the text - and the reader uses the text to construct her self a an audience.

See it in

BSU Position Statement
A syllabus. Casts student into what kinds of roles? what demands? and what do you provide to help the student-reader individually to imagine herself in that role.

Ong's ideas are repurposed for contemporary rhetoric in considerations of the sexualized rhetorical situation. The TexualizedRhetoricalSituation and NotesOnTheTexualizedRhetoricalSituation

From Ong's perspective, student difficulties in writing might be seen as a difficulty in constructing the role the audience is to play. Might result from novelty of discourse community conventions, from limited models, from cross-conflicts.

Think of how you signal roles when you write academic work, as in writing abstracts for this class.

BUT - Do we teach this conception of audience in first year comp? Do we teach aspects of it? That is, imagine your audience, their values, positions, beliefs ... And create an ethos to suit that positioning? Which is to ask,

How do we make this a pedagogically sound and useful conception?
How do we use it to theorize or critique our teaching of audience?

from a brief from Coley apropos writing on a wiki

The ... continuum of audience as self to known to mass unknown has been criticized for failing to recognize the nuances inherent in the audience structure. In light of these nuances, ... consider Ong’s audience as fiction and Ede and Lunsford’s audience addressed/audience invoked. ... Ong (1975) wrote that the writer must “construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role . . .” and that this same audience must “correspondingly fictionalize itself” (p. 60). In the wiki community, this means that audience members are constructed by the author(s) of a given piece based ... on past fictionalizations of previous audiences who assumed roles related to other audiences for other (previous) authors. The wiki single-author is related to all other community authors, knows what those authors contributed to community knowledge, and thus conjures up the audiences needed to continue the conversation.

Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked

Lunsford and Ede

A critique of One. They posit that the fictionalizing is more constrained by actualities than Ong suggests. 85

BUT l&e don't finely distinguish between an actual speaking audience and an oral audience. Ong's thought experiment about a mass audience listening and individual readers reading needs to be considered.

This leads L&E to posit traditional rhetorical constructions of audience given specifics of rhet sit 86. And so derive a spectrum of possible audience and writer roles. In all cases, the writer envisions and defines a role. But what affordances she employs - how - depends.

Part of the slip between Ong and L&E is how they are looking at the term succeed, in writing that succeeds. Ong seems to be taking a literary stance of success - succeeds as literature. L&E seem to use a rhetorical sense of persuade.

Problems in the diagram

The diagram doesn't tell about obligations, resources, needs, or constraints as they claim 88. Just names roles and makes relationships between those roles.
Roles are pretty generalized. Miss a lot, neutralize or ignore power.
Roles are modeled as in relation to writer.

Finally get their restatement out on p 90: The writer doesnt create a role so much as uses material and emotional resources to invoke it.

We might conceive of audience then as overdetermined and rich concept that may be best specified through analysis of precise, concrete situations. 92.

Who are they, and
what role do you want them play with respect to the discourse and
What will you provide that will signal that role and
Enable them to play it?

We can set aside the normative perspective for a different sense of success with the question, How do you help readers imagine themselves as the audience that you're casting them as?

In any case, the audience in both One and L&E is more active - creative - than the conception of mass audience.

Consider the role we will put the rhetorical construct of audience in teaching writing. E&L ask a pedagogical question up front: "What is the best way to help students recognize the significance of the element of audience in any rhetorical sit?"

Addressed (real) outside the text.
Invoked (constructed) implied by the text as written

Each is incomplete on their own, so L&E use both: a synthesis of the addressed and invoked

Writer is guided by a sense of purpose and particularities of the rhet sit in establishing a range of potential roles the audience may play: colleague, critic, mass, anomalous ...

Writers to be read must adapt discourse to meed the need and expectations of the actual, addressed audience. but the text invokes the role the reader is to play. some of those roles - relational roles - are invoked in the genre (tech writing, worksheet, textbook, assignment sheet). Writers construct this invoked audience using resources in language: style, tone, mood, content, even material of paper, font, ...

But audiences are real and may reject the role - unless the text in situation accommodates them.

Applications of L&E
Example from Country Diary - Audience actually addressed - us - may have a hard time playing the audience invoked - who are UKK, middle-class -

Reach
Some notes on L&E's latest work, and notes on audiences on the Internet.

Who is the audience for google hits?
What about unwanted audiences? what do we teach about those?

Breuch: Post-Process

provides the cross-talk

Breuch
JAC not CCC 2002

Pretty high-level stuff. It is questioning the basis on which much of writing teaching is grounded- process. Do its of special interest to more experienced and invested teachers of writing.

She may be articulating some of your doubts about this writing process idea. She calls this a philosophical exercise: a mind-experiment, poking at or interrogating our assumptions to see what comes up

The set up: By 2000, process theories were being critiqued as inadequate explanation for the act of writing. The main critique was that process would be more or less universal, or at least generalizable - would be valid more or all of the time.

It was becoming clear, esp when we draw in post-modern, anti-foundational precepts, that theories of process weren't telling us much about how people acted or what they did. Process has become the foundation. So now what?

But it asks and critiques questions and positions that GAs might or should have.

Can writing be taught?
Can it be taught as a system? Or must it be taught as something non-system.
What position or use is our knowledge of writing in teaching?
What kind of act is writing? Determinate? Indeterminate?
What position do we place seeming determinate systems (grammar) in?
What kind of thing is teaching writing? A system? An initiation? An apprenticship? Mentorship? Something else?
In what terms ought we conceptualizer writing? As internal conceptual or as external, public, social? Or something else?
If we don't ground writing in foundationalist beliefs, how do we teach from a non-foundationalist perspective?

These are positions that were debated in the 60s and 70s, and still are.

The article reviews reconceptualizations of teaching writing.

The heads starting on p 105 give the OV of a post-process view of writing

It rejects mastery as an end of teaching
Nature or assumptions of writing as an act
The shape or character or possibility of teaching

Strikes substance with
Post process perspective encourages us to re-examine

writing as a situated, specific, but indeterminate activity
Teaching as indeterminate activity
Comm interactions w students as dialogic 98-9

Some aspects - some of these are not in Breuch

not a lot of focus on material and ideological situations
political agendas of standardized tests, whole language emphasis, single-language mandates

What happened: When we see writing as a process, the act becomes a body of knowledge. That is, if we know about pre-writing, then we know how to write. Etc. This is an echo of the previous generation's mis-understanding: If students know the terms of grammar, they can write. So, writing-as-process became incorporated in curricula as reified, as a package that can be taught by novices and taught at any level.

So, Breuch's argument:
Set aside process and

re-examine or re-think writing as an indeterminate activity rather than a body of knowledge,
think of our methods as indeterminate activities rather than exercises towards mastery
think of interactions with students as dialogic rather than monologic

But w have a problem: Writing when seen as an activity rather than a body of knowledge it becomes unteachable. there's nothing to teach. B addresses this as a misunderstanding: teaching writing as a system is not possible, with the emphasis on as a system.

This is not the same argument that is made that writing is mysterious / too complex to teach / teaching writing would destroy the mystery of how writing gets written / can't be taught because writing depends on talent - all of which are creationism: the Sarah Palin school of teaching. This perspective relies on high priests and subservient believers: monologic lecturing.

B is going to argue that it might be teachable, so let's look at it. Unpack some terms

mentors are not high priests but active collaborators, or students themselves
dialogism - needs to be developed into a functional dialogism (that is, operationalized), on p 103
set aside mastery - set aside idea that writing and process are a body of knowledge - knowing what - for the idea that writing is a knowing how: how-centered.
indeterminate activity - the act can't be predicted in any particular case - neither for writing or learning
Heisenberg. Measuring will influence what is seen.

Given the impossibility of resting our understanding on absolutes, what do we do?

Assumptions - and some implication for teaching an indeterminate act

writing is public - and so get at able. it's not a private, secret act. it's done out here - with language, and language carries the culture with it. using language is to give in to an audience.
writing is interpretive - won't rely on a universal foundation and so we need to focus on the nature of the interpretation instead of its grounding
writing is situated - it's a physical and material act. kairos, materially situated, varies by mode and medium, so foster an awareness of this.

Overall, rather than teach form, sentence structure, invention, arrangement, talent, teach a critical consciousness of writing as public interpretation that is materially and socially grounded. And do that teaching as a public, interpretive, situated act.

This seems to demand that we give up foundational perspectives such as talent is the thing. etc

When B moves to practice, she argues that teaching writing becomes an act of mentoring rather than delivering content (120) - and the nature of that mentoring would then be based on the nature of the writing process.

This is nice because it sweeps away a content-based curriculum that leads towards a recipe practice of process for an indeterminate act of process.

Teachers become integral to text creation, and the act becomes public, interpretive, and situated -

and that in turn has big implications for DE
this also suggests that the process of writing is fundamentally the same no matter what the genre: academic paper or slam poetry.

Background readings in Foundationalism, Theory and Practice

Hall of Mirrors: Antifoundationalist Theory and the Teaching of Writing, David W. Smit, JAC 15.1.
Theory and Its Practice in Composition Studies (pdf). Kory Lawson Ching. JAC 27.3-4 (2007).
Bizzell, Patricia. "Beyond Anti-Foundationalism to Rhetorical Authority: Problems Defining "Cultural Literacy." CE 52 (1990): 661-675. Print.

Morgan at Biro : MorgansCompTheoryNotes12Sept

Who am I this time?

Lead questions