Long Overdue Name Change

I opened this blog on September 26th, 2004. I was a rookie cop, and I was in entering the mourning stage of my break up with my old life as a professional actor, playwright, and general literati, so I started a blog to help preserve that part of myself that I feared police work was already starting to kill.

Because I saw it primarily as a space to work out questions of literary aesthetic (films, novels, plays etc.) I gave it a name that parodied literary journal titles, which always seemed to me to end in "Review" (Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, the Southern Review, and so on. A search on the Poets and Writers database lists 248 journals with "review" in the title). In an act of self effacement, I named it the Brummagem Review, an early-modern era reference to counterfeit coins.

Of course, I misspelled it as "Brummegem," an error that lasted an embarrassingly long time in the banner title (not the only time I've done that: see the back cover of my self-published play, The Origin of Language, also the second act of my Master's thesis Murder/Rapture).

The blog has taken a number of forms throughout the years from baseball column, to political opinion page (on both sides of the aisle), to culture site. The past several years, as I have landed more solidly in Composition and Rhetoric as a graduate students and teacher, it has mostly become my place to work out ideas about teaching, composing, and literacy.

With that in mind, I've decided to change the name to Composition Cop as a nod to my two lives, and as a play on "grammar police." This is already my handle on both Twitter and Instagram, so it seemed a natural move.

Apropos of blogs in general, I'll still feel free to let the subject matter stray when I feel like it (see my last post regarding Valentine's Day cards), but this name fits much better than a misspelled, antiquated self-offending word.

Valentine's Day Cards: when you're told [by Hallmark] that you need to say "I'm Sorry."

The process of buying Valentine's Day cards is one of the most frustrating experiences of the year for me. I find the writing in these cards terrible. It could be that, as it so happens, I'm a pretty decent writer myself, so I always feel like I could just buy a blank card (if it were possible to find these) and write something as well-written as any of these cards and far more personalized. This year, as I was searching for a card that didn't make me sick, I finally put my finger on the problem. Cards in the "For My Wife" section come in two basic genres:

1) Comical cards that make sex jokes, which for some reason, I find incredibly tacky, and

2) Cards couched in the language of apology. Every card I pull off the shelf contains phrases like "maybe I don't say it often enough. . ." This is a relatively explicit apology, but even those that aren't this direct contain this common trope. There are references to expressing love "just because it's Valentine's Day. . ." and other such suggestions that Valentine's Day is a day in which we husbands make up for a year's worth of neglecting to express love for our wives.

It's incredibly difficult to find cards that don't make such references. This is, I suspect, a product of an essentialist view of male behavior which assumes that we are all reticent to tell our wives that we love them and will therefore need to apologize for this. But what about those of us who happen to be decent husbands? Whose wives do know that we love them?

I might be tempted to say that we don't need Valentine's Day, because we do this stuff every day. My wife would not agree with this. We don't do elaborate Valentine's Day stuff. This year, we're going to have a picnic with our boys. Later, we'll eat expensive chocolate and cheap champagne, and that's about it. It is, however, still important that we buy each other cards. So, can someone just make blank cards that aren't covered in pictures of kittens?*

*Charissa tells me that she has this same problem. Cards for husbands also come in two genres: "you're a jerk but I love you anyway," and, of course, sex jokes.

What are Students Thinking? -- Quoting the Dictionary

See the explanation of the "What are Students Thinking" post series, where I explain what these posts are about and what they are for.

For this first "What are Students Thinking" post, I'm considering why students quote dictionaries. This is one of those freshmen cliches that all teachers of first year writing know and abhor. Composition theorists have mentioned this problem in discussions of the positivist views of language many students hold. Our students, like many people outside of English departments, have an understanding of  language as fixed and definite. To them, words have explicit, singular meanings, and these meanings may be found in dictionaries. Dictionaries, to our students, are catalogues of the factual, unassailable, exact and, correct meanings of particular words. There is, for them, a naturalized understanding of the way words work, as if their meanings come from God, who directly inspired the prophet Webster.

When I talk about definition arguments with my students, I begin by foregrounding where definitions come from. Most students have never considered that dictionaries are actually written by people. Thus, definitions are, after all, the opinions of a collection of human authors and their editors. To demonstrate this, I like to show students definitions from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which includes such gems as:

oats: a grain, which in England is fed to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

Centuries removed from Dr. Johnson's dictionary, we can see the very obvious class structure implied in this definition. Yet we take our own modern dictionaries as purely un-ideological repositories of linguistic truth. We don't register (or even know about) the political aims of Noah Webster's spelling reforms, undertaken in order to differentiate (read: un-Frenchify) American English. Instead, these definitions are taken to be givens.

For our students, this means that a dictionary definition gives them solid ground. After all, in asking students to write argumentative papers, we are forcing them to confront the continent nature of the conversations they join. They're finding out that truth is not as solid as they've perhaps been made to believe. The very process of argument emphasizes this. We all make contributions to a conversation, and no one is quite right, and maybe no one is quite wrong either. This is disconcerting, especially for students who just want the right answer, the one that's going to get them a good grade.

A dictionary definition, then, is at least one unassailable truth, a thing that cannot be attacked. A word, at least, is what it is and no one can count off because they disagree with it.

But even in the argument of definition papers I assign, where the continent, unsettled nature of particular terms and concepts is actually the point, I see these dictionary definitions cropping up. In fact, in the unit my classes are finishing up, we emphasized the continent nature of words, and talked about the histories of these dictionaries in order to denaturalize my students' views of language.

I even went so far as to just flat tell them, "you should not quote the dictionary in your papers for all the reasons we've been talking about." After all, the whole point was for them to build their own definitions and argue for their legitimacy.

Yet when the first drafts came in, I found dictionary definition after dictionary definition. What gives? Did students not believe any of the things I'd said about where these definitions come from? Did they just flat fail to listen? This seems like a pessimistic view of my impressively involved students. As I said in the intro to this series, I'm much more interested in the rhetorical choices students are making when they fail to meet expectations, especially those I've made pretty explicit. Students know that these definitions are not solid facts, but rater opinions. They know that the point of this assignment is to make definitions on our own. So why would they, nevertheless, default to these dictionary definitions?

A few of them actually cited the definition in order to problematize it. They quoted the definition then went on to write about how deficient the definition, and this culture's understanding of the concept, actually are. This is actually a fairly sophisticated use of these definitions. If I react only to the fact that the broke my "rule" against quoting dictionaries, I fail to give them credit for doing something that is actually quite advanced. Instead, maybe I have to consider such moves as a fair exception to my rule. But what of students who make the more typical move of using the definitions as the final authority?

Nancy Sommers, David Bartholomae and others have written about the difficulty in helping students to develop a sense of agency and authority in their writing. One of our tasks as first year writing teachers is to enculturate students into the expert world of academe. Part of our job is to help them sound like experts, even before they really are. But our students seem have a great deal of apprehension about this. After all, their role in education has always been as receptors of knowledge--vessels into which knowledge is poured by teachers who are assumed to know more than them.

The kinds of writing most of them have done before coming to college illustrate this. Before coming to college, students spend a great deal of time writing book report in which their goal is to prove they've read the book, essay tests where their goal is to show they've internalized the course material so that they have become conversant with it, and other such performative writing tasks. So, even in their writing, their goal has always been to show that they have learned other people's knowledge.

Yet, what we are asking them to do is to contribute knowledge--to create it. In asking them to formulate definitional arguments, I am asking them to assume the role of the expert. Students seem reluctant to do this. Again, their role has always been to learn from the experts, not to be them. Asking them to become experts has disoriented them. It may even feel presumptuous to them to assume such a role. They respond by defaulting to someone else's expertise, as if to say "I may pose my definition, but at the end, I'd better provide the real definition by the real expert."

So how do I counter this? How do I encourage students to assume their own agency and expertise? How do I convince them that their definitions are as valid as those written by interns and editors at Webster's, and are in fact probably better (because they haven't been simplified into one sentence).  These are open questions, but answers that we cannot arrive at unless we ask better questions than "weren't you listening when I said not to quote the dictionary?"

What are Students Thinking?

Writing teachers are full of pet peeves. This is perhaps inevitable since every time we experience writing habits we find distasteful, we do so while grading a huge stack of papers. This means that we experience these over and over so that it seems like language is infested with these things. The common response of many who teach writing is simply to complain a lot. We create lists of freshman cliches, which we share with one another or sometimes with students (I once had one such list designed to help students find these in their own writing. It was tellingly entitled "Ugh Words"). We create elaborate jokes, send terrible students sentences back and forth to each other, and create snarky internet memes (ironically, about the terrible things the internet is supposed to be doing to student writing). I myself have written a series of five-pararaph essays about why the five-paragraph essay is so bad.

What we often forget to do, to our own shame, is to try to figure out why students do these things. Perhaps this is because we assume that these problems in our students' writing exhibit some kind of natural deficiency in their processes, work ethic, or with the students themselves. In other words, we assume that the problem is with our students, and not with our ability to teach them. Students have these problems because they are lazy, waiting until the night before the paper is due without time to really revise or evaluate their own writing, because they simply aren't listening to us in class when we tell them what [not] to do, or because they just don't care that much.

I, on the other hand, prefer to eschew utterly pessimistic views of our students and the work they do, mainly because such views are not particularly helpful with regard to my own teaching. It is, instead, much more helpful to look at these common problems in our students' writing, not as natural deficiencies or personal attacks against me personally, but as rhetorical choices our students make. In other words, when these students go awry, what were they trying to do, why did it fail, and how do we help them do what they were trying to do in more acceptable ways.

With that in mind, I'm beginning a new segment of this blog that deals especially with these peevish problems in student writing with the goal of theorizing what students are doing when they make common mistakes, or rather, when they write in ways which seem totally acceptable and appropriate to them, but which we hate. Assuming that students aren't doing these things because they hate me and wish to attack me, or because they are idiots who can't be helped, or because the golden age of my university years has given way to the incoherence of net-speak, the goal of this series will be to try to develop our own pedagogies so that we may respond to these problems in ways that are optimistic and constructive.

The first is already in the hopper; it will deal with students who quote dictionaries, and it will drop later tonight or tomorrow. So be watching for it. Now, I'm off to eat tacos.

Space--Male Privilege--Gender Guilt(?)

Any jogger knows what to do when he sees a strange dog on the next block: cross to the other side of the street and walk. Similarly, when we are out at night, we know to stay under the streetlights and on well-walked places. We know these things because we have a developed understanding of space and how we behave within it--so much so that it seems intuitive. We don't often, however, know or recognize that we have this awareness. When we interact with space, we generally do so on auto-pilot, without really noticing what we are doing or even that we are doing anything.

My most recent research has centered on the ways in which we "read" space and how, thus, space is textualized in ways that both encourage and constrict movement, empowering some people in particular spaces while restricting others.

When presenting this research recently, a fellow graduate student asked me about the gender differences in the particular space I was researching. How do women view the space, and do they move differently through it? Because my own research focused more on class (a different form of Other), I really had no data to answer this question. But it was a great question; no doubt women perceive the space differently than men, and it's reasonable to suspect that these perceptions influence the way women move through and interact with the particular space.

Then, a few days ago, I caught myself doing something interesting. I was leaving campus rather late on a cold day, which means that there weren't many people walking around. As I walked across an empty parking lot heading back to my car, a woman got out of a car further down the lot but directly in my path. I did something very interesting without really thinking about it in the moment: I changed my path. 

As soon as I had done it, I realized what I had just done. I had diverted my path to keep from walking too close to a woman in an empty parking lot in the twilight of a cold day. I had done this because I realized that crossing the path of a relatively large man in a black coat in empty parking lot was going to make her very nervous. I would have never done this to avoid another man; to do so would have been a sign of weakness--the weaker primate making way for the stronger. This, on the other hand, was a curious bit of chivalry, one that had happened naturally and, I think, was borne out of my recent hyper-awareness of space.

The incident also made me realize that feeling comfortable in public spaces is yet another male privilege that I have enjoyed and also completely naturalized. I've seen scores of news stories and public information campaigns advising women on how to protect themselves from predators. Included on all of these lists is an awareness of space. Know who is around, know what kind of area you're in, look for escape routes, and on and on. I, however, have never been taught any of these things (except for some versions of this in the police academy, but these were taught in and on very different terms).

What this means is that I have been allowed to blithely move through space with little awareness of how my presence in that space effects others. This means that everywhere I've ever gone where there has been a women present, she has had to pay close attention to me and she has had to adjust her movements accordingly. I, on the other hand, have been free to disregard her presence or even fail to notice her presence at all.

I've asked my wife before what it's like to be a woman in public--does she live with the knowledge that every man she passes looks at her? Does this bother her? Does she eventually just get used to it? Again here, I am made aware that women have had to think about how to handle me, though I have never been taught to be aware of my effect on them.

I'm not exactly exactly sure what I'm suggesting? Am I saying that men should stop staring at women in the mall? Absolutely! Am I saying that we should divert our paths in empty parking lots to stay away from women, thus protecting them from being uncomfortable with us? I'm not sure. I am aware that such extreme chivalry might be another form of sexism, based on some ingrained assumption that woman is a frail species that I must protect, even from the psychological effects of my presence. At the very least, I'm asking to be made more aware and for other men also to be more aware of how we ourselves interact with and are part of space, and how that effects others--others of different races, classes, genders. That doesn't mean that we must carry guilt simply for being born as we were; it's not my fault that I was born a white male to a middle class family. It does mean, though, that I should be aware of what it means to others that I am what I am, and how my presence in a space necessarily influences that space.

2013 Word Cloud

Here's what I wrote about in 2013. This word cloud includes the entire text of this blog for the last year.

Alabama Petition Edit

I should be grading my own students' papers, but it's been a long couple of weeks and I could use a diversion. So I graded someone I didn't teach instead. Perhaps you've seen the petition posted by an angry Alabama fan, pseudonymously referring to himself as "TC,"  asking the NCAA to make Alabama and Auburn play an overtime period (or an "overtime play," if you prefer) because Chris Davis was clearly out of bounds.

The petition, as it turns out, has a few errors. Because I assume that the writer must have gone to the University of Alabama based on his level of interest in the outcome of this amateur matchup between student athletes, and because I am, after all, a college teacher myself, I decided to make a few corrections. I'm just trying to be helpful.

I realize that this is not a piece of formal writing, but an online petition, so I've overlooked certain things in keeping with the looser genre conventions of informal online writing (I am a great believer that grammar is situated in context). For this reason, I have not "corrected" capitalized letters where I know they are being used for effect, sentences that begin with conjunctions (since I also do this when stylistically appropriate), or omitted commas where these omissions have become more-or-less common practice.

Anyway, here are my corrections. Hope this helps, TC:

Erasure of Race, and Other Things That Don't Help

My friend (and former research subject) Crystal posted a post this morning by Jen Yamato at Deadline.com about the minor scandal at the USA Today when they used the headline “Holiday Nearly Beat Thor as Race-Themed Films Soar" to lead a story about the success of The Best Man Holiday. Certainly, there is plenty to criticize in the insidiously reductive phrase "race-themed," a phrase that suggests that the movie is actually about race. This was a no doubt unintentional but nevertheless troubling gaffe, to be sure. There is something slightly unseemly about suggesting a genre that is Black Film. Yet, I find Yamato's response troubling as well.

Yamato acknowledges that "mainstream media seems to have trouble characterizing a film like this," then she offers the suggestion that "maybe the simplest route is to call it a Romantic Comedy." Certainly, this route is simple. It has the benefit of refusing to characterize the film based only on the race of its characters. This allows us to avoid any suggestion that we might be racist, since we don't even bring race up.

This follows a typical post-race approach of trying to simply pretend that race does't exist. To do this, we must also ignore a defining characteristic of the film, since surely the choice to cast all African American characters was purposeful. To pretend that this is not the case is to disallow  discussion about these artistic and political choices.

One of the salient features of films like this one is that they place African Americans is positions of economic privilege. Thus, they write African Americans into subject positions generally dominated by whites in both film and society at large. In this film, and others like it (suggesting that perhaps there is indeed an emerging genre here), African American characters are the center of the action, rather than at the periphery. Furthermore, they are characterized as wealthy, educated, well connected, and highly nuanced. Again, all subject positions typically thought of as white.

These films, therefore, create a really interesting counter-history, one that deserves serious critical attention. This hypothetical counter-history allows us to question why such portrayals are so rare in our plays and films and, more importantly, why they are so rare in society. They allow us to ask why these films seem so out of the ordinary that gaffes like the one made by USA Today are even possible. For, indeed, what is so strange about these films is that they don't portray African Americans in the way films generally have in US culture: as poor, or downtrodden, or as gang members--in other words, why they are allowed to be just like white people.

Such questions should trouble our thinking about American film art, and the modern myth that we are post-race at all. Of course, such questions are not possible if we pretend that race does not exist, if we commit an erasure by failing to note exactly what it is that makes these films so unique. While it may be inappropriate to to evaluate these films on race alone, since indeed there are other plot elements and genre conventions at work, it is also inappropriate to refuse to address it. Criticizing the USA Today for myopically referring to these films as "race-themed," does not mean that we should ignore that race is indeed one of the themes. Doing so only ensures that we continue to pretend that race is no longer a contested subject in need to sustained critical reflection. Such erasures are, therefore, just as injurious as what Yamato set out to criticize.

If a [Digital] Tree Falls in a Forest Full of Falling Trees, Does Anyone Hear It?

In our Teaching College Composition class, we have just discussed J. Elizabeth Clark's "The Digital Imperative: Making the Case for a 21st-Century Pedagogy," a response to Kathleen Blake Yancey's work and call to arms for composition teachers to take up "the digital imperative" by involving our students in engaging digital literacies. Obviously, I'm a supporter of the use of technology to teach and theorize writing (hence, this blog). Many of the literacy skills called for by Yancey, Blake, and others are, indeed, imperatives. But there was one section of Clark's piece that troubled me and that I think smacks a little of what Lanksheare and Knobel have called "boon theory." For Lanksheare and Knobel, this is one half of a binary that includes both "bane" and "boon." For boon thinkers, technology is a panacea, the thing that will finally cure social ills, provide universal access to powerful literacy tools, give agency to those currently without it, and so on. Certainly, the piece as a whole does not display this, as part of its exigency is Clark's understanding that the digital world requires new sorts of critical literacy for our students. Yet, her description some of her particular classroom activities gave me pause.

Her composition courses, or at least those she discusses here, involve online activities including ePortfolios and blogs, which her students are required to perform. In addition to giving students hands on experience with the types of composing many of them will be expected to do in life outside academe, Blake claims that "when they tell their multimodal stories and share them on the internet, their education has an immediate impact on their lives and their interests, allowing them to put their new skills--like research and multimodal composition--into play immediately for audiences that may include their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (32).

Indeed, one of the most promising aspects of including digital components to Composition classrooms is the possibility of building a sense of audience for our students. By writing in forums that are indeed public, it is hoped, our students will have actual audiences beyond us as teachers. Because of this, says Blake, "our students feel pressured to create effective arguments and to respond to critiques of this arguments" (34). It was exactly this possibility that led me to include a blogging component to my composition classes at Oklahoma State in 2010-2011. I believed that asking my students to publish in forums where their writing was indeed public would both cause them to think about forming arguments for actual audience, and that it would also give them a personal investment in the writing that would lead to greater engagement. However, I found that this was not necessarily the case.

In order to give my students a sense of having a real audience, I did a couple of things. The first is that I created a mother-ship blog that gave them potential blogging topics (which related to our course readings), and provided links to blogs by other student groups. Students were required to respond to at least one other blog, but encouraged to read and respond to several. My desire was that we would be able to establish a kind of online community between my two sections in which a healthy and interesting dialogue would take place. The second thing I did was to recruit friends outside the university to respond to some of the first questions I posed. The idea here was to give students the sense that people outside our class, and even our university, would be able to read and respond to these public blogs.

Ultimately, however, I saw little awareness of audience in my students' blog posts. They were often very short, riddled with typos suggesting that students were not proofing their posts, and often read like direct responses to the teacher. In other words, what I saw was that students treated their blogs as if they were simply electronic versions of in-class journals. To be sure, some of the problems were due to the way I assigned the blogs.

For one thing, blogs were written in groups. I intended to do double duty with the blogs in giving students experience both in online writing and in collaborative writing, an important skill in the modern workplace. This meant that whatever wash't finished in the classroom time devoted to blogging had to be finished by the students over the weekend. Most groups ended up simply taking turns finishing the blog over the weekend rather than trying to make time to meet with one another.

Another problem was that the class time devoted to writing blogs was often insufficient. The idea was that students would come prepared with ideas in mind (I eventually created a space on the classes' Online Classrooms, a format similar to Blackboard to encourage discussion prior to class), then they would actually do the compositions in class. Often, however, most of the time spent in class was devoted to settling on a topic, leaving much of the composition itself to occur over the weekend outside of class. Considering the wide range of quality across the posts, I suspect that other group members rarely revised or proofed the post, leaving it entirely to the group member whose "turn" it was.

These problems, either of which could be easily overcome, suggest that students did not necessarily feel more involvement in their blog writing knowing that there was a real audience. Ultimately, I suspect that they understood that their audience was neither large, nor actually public. Students understand, perhaps better than we do, that the sheer volume of communication now being performed online means that just because something can be seen by a public audience does't mean it will be. Students seem to feel that their online, school-based writing is going to be buried by the mass of information now online. Their writing is a tree falling in a forest full of falling trees; their voices are drowned out in the cacophony.

This is not to say that these forms of writing don't still have value, or even that they can't help our students develop a sense of audience. This is only to say that they won't automatically do so. We will still have to work to create real rhetorical situations for our students by creating writing opportunities that will encourage students to build their own audiences. In other words we want students to be performing writing tasks that they will care about and be proud of, enough so that they will advertise their writing to "their family, their friends, and even wider publics" (Blake 32).

Part of this will require us to make these forms of writing more central to our classes. At OSU (as with the university where I now teach) there were programmatic requirements that a certain percentage of the final grade be based on program-wide rather standardized essays. This means that the electronic writing portions of my classes are relatively small, and the students responded accordingly. After all, our students are budgeting their time, therefore they will privilege the assignments that our grading scales privilege. Other types of writing will be seen as extras, or even busy work. After all, in our classes, the grade will always be more important than any audience. So, if we wish for audiences to matter to our students, these audiences must also be important to us.

Where Does a Claim Come From?

I've been struggling this week to help my students understand how to arrive at a claim through synthesis of sources. Traditional composition classes have often involved writing assignments that allow ready-made opinion based claims. The model that I learned under years ago (I took only Comp 2, having tested out of Comp 1) involved getting students to argue about politics then turning this into writing. It was a model that was pedagogically vacuous for many reasons, but one of the most important was that it allowed us to make claims based on our own already held untested opinions. So, for the most part, we were simply regurgitating already held beliefs in terms of a three part thesis (Claim, evidence 1, evidence 2, evidence 3, transition).

Even the more sophisticated assignments I have given to students over the past several years have been confined enough that claims were limited to only a handful of possibilities. My auto-ethnography assignment tends to encourage claims about how the activities of a group are related to certain ethics of the group. My scholarly problem paper tells students to write about an important current conversation in the field, so this allows students to appropriate the claims of others. My other assignments re similarly constrained. Certainly, it's not possible (or less possible) to plug in the political opinions taught to them at home as claims, but the assignments still lead students to claims through the prompts. The assignment I'm starting with this semester, on the other hand, is much broader. It's based on synthesis of essays by four authors. The assignment doesn't, in and of itself, offer a research question that will lead more directly to a claim. For this reason, the possibilities are far less constrained, and the claims may be much more far flung. So long as the reading suggest these claims in an articulable way, the claim is appropriate.

The Need for a Heuristic: 

What this means is that, perhaps for the first time, I'm faced with the task of helping students develop claims in the much more open ways that I am used to working in. My students struggle to come up with claims that they feel are appropriate to the conversation, a conversation that they are, after all, just entering. They are, like I was, used to using ready-made arguments, in which they simply plug new pieces of evidence into claims they already hold.

Thus, I have been struggling to think of a heuristic to help my students understand where ideas come from. How do academic writers develop claims? Though, as an academic writer, I am developing claims from research all the time, I have not really engaged in a meta-discursive analysis of how this happens. Thus, when students stay after class to ask what I mean when I tell them that they should develop a claim to base their papers on, the process is almost as mysterious to me as it is to them. To use language Doug Downs might, I have "process knowledge" regarding how to arrive at claims, but I don't have the "declarative knowledge" to help my students do the same. This means I am having difficulty arrived at a useful heuristic to give to students.

In lieu of a helpful, more comprehensive heuristic of where claims come from, I've decided here to at least trace my own process in order to provide an example for students of how a claim happens, what influences go into making a claim, and what I do with it after I've found it. I'm writing this with two audiences in mind: my students who have, no doubt, already gone through the first steps of this process but now must figure out what to do from here, and to fellow instructors who want to help students understand where ideas come from and who want to understand this ourselves. Thus, what follows is a narrative about how reading leads to particular claims.

Arriving at a Claim: A Process Approach:

In the first unit of this semester, students engaged in the Writing about Writing approach here at OU have read four essays, which they must synthesize into an essay centered around an argumentative claim. These essays, in the order we read them, are: John Swales "The Concept of Discourse Community," James Paul Gee "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction," James Porter "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community," and Joseph Harris "The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing." All these essays, as suggested by their titles, involve the ongoing discussion of discourse community--what one is, how it works, and how folks get into one.

Swales offers a definition if discourse community, asserting that it's a concept that has been under discussion but which has not yet been carefully defined. In order to theorize a definition, he offers six criteria that any language community must meet in order to be called a discourse community. Important for this discussion is his final criteria that "a discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise" (473). His explanation of this criteria explains that a community will have levels of membership. Some will be experienced, subject area experts, while others will be novice or apprentice members. Members will come and go so that there is a range of experience and expertise in any discourse community.

Gee, on the other hand, has a much different idea about Discourse membership (by the way, his use of "Discourse" rather than "discourse community" is notable, as it projects certain attitudes toward the idea of "community").  For Gee, one is either in the Discourse or one isn't. There is no provisional membership. As he says it, "one cannot engage in a Discourse in a less than fully fluent manner" (487).  For Gee, one is apprenticed into a Discourse but is not fully a member until the group itself accepts the new member, which involves vesting the member with "social goods" (487).Thus, the salient difference between Swales and Gee is their understanding of how one gets into a community. For Swales, there is a process of enculturation where membership is, for a while at least, provisional and partial. For Gee, one is "mushfaking" (490) until one is admitted. Gee goes on to suggest that we should teach our students to engage in mushfake until one is accepted. At this time, the student can decide whether or not to fully engage as a full member or to subvert the discourse and rebel against it.

In reading this last part of Gee's argument, I notice that this seems to suggest a certain attitude toward Discourse. Why would we want to teach our students to subvert the Discourses they have worked hard to enter? The logical assumption here is that Gee doesn't think much of Discourses. Gee's argument about how one gets into a Discourse, which is that one must be admitted by the group, suggests that, to Gee, a Discourse is a good old boys' club--a hierarchal structure designed to let some in and keep others out. Gee seems to hold a psuedo-Marxist attitude toward Discourses as oppressive structures, otherwise, it makes no sense to want to empower students to overthrow it.

I want to take the time here to point out that my interpretation of Gee's attitude toward Discourse is necessarily influenced by my own perspectives and experiences. I notice these things and develop these interpretations because I have been exposed to Marxist critical theory, and critical pedagogy which stresses the importance of a de-centered classroom. So, my own views of the world and background in rhetorical and educational theory has caused me to notice certain things and interpret them in particular ways. And this is okay, because my interpretation, although personal, is nevertheless plausible. I can show that it is a reasonable interpretation and argue effectively for it. Thus, I am beginning to formulate a claim centered around Gee's ideas about Discourse membership and the possibly oppressive nature of Discourse.

This early claim is bolstered when we get to Porter's essay, which I am now reading with my early claim at least rattling around in the back of my mind. Porter, which is talking primarily about intertextuality as definitive of a discourse community (we're not communities in the traditional sense of shared space, language, etc, but in terms of shared textual practices, canonical texts, etc), claims that "our goal should be to help students learn to write for the discourse communities they choose to join" (94). He goes on to say that "our immediate goal is to produce 'socialized' writers who are full-fledged members of their discourse community, producing competent, useful discourse within that community" (95, emphasis added).

Here, I notice that Porter's goal of helping students enter their discourse communities is altogether different than Gee's goal to help students subvert them. Seeing other scholars suggest that we should help students join (which suggests that a discourse community is a good thing) bolsters my claim that Gee thinks Discourses are perhaps bad.

So now I have a solid claim that I can run with. Of course, my goal is not just to talk about Gee, but to synthesize all these essays. For this reason, I find that I need to broaden this claim in order to account for the other authors. So I expand my claim in order to come to a tentative claim that will include these other authors.

So my claim becomes something like this: These authors' views of discourse community membership, especially regarding the ways in which people join them, are connected to their attitudes about discourse communities.

Now I have a guiding idea that I can use to approach a paper. This acts as my thesis statement. My process now becomes using the texts to test this claim. As I write and revise a paper, I revisit the texts looking for evidence that these authors' understanding of membership might be guided by their attitudes toward communities, that is, whether they think these communities are good and that we ought to help students get in, or that they are bad and we ought to help students navigate them well enough that they can change them. This evidence becomes the body of my paper.

Conclusion:

This is the process I have undergone in formulating a claim based on these readings. As a student searching for a claim, the trick is to pay attention to the things you are noticing as you read. These things will be based on context. This is to say that you will notice different things based on your own views of the world, education, and pure chance. This is fine. Be comfortable with this, as it is part of the intertextuality Porter talks about.

When you notice things in a text, begin asking questions about these things. These are often referred to as the "so what" or "why" questions. What might these things you've noticed say about what you are reading? Why are these authors talking about things in these ways? The answers to these questions become early claims which guide the rest of your reading. If these early claims remain plausible or if they are in fact bolstered by further reading, you've developed a thesis for your paper. If not, you will begin noticing other things as you read further, and one of these will develop into a claim.

I have no doubt that there are other processes at work in developing claims, and other ways to come to them. But hopefully this will be helpful in helping us understand how claims come to be. Hopefully, by "watching" as I develop a claim, the reader will see these processes at work in himself or herself and will know how to turn these into workable claims.