I think I'd be doing Ken Macrorie a disservice if I didn't feel compelled to write creatively after reading a selection from Telling Writing. So I did. And here is what I came up with after 30 minutes of fingers-to-computer-key writing:
It’s Saturday, and I’m cleaning my grandparents’ house so they can sell it. My grandfather has moved out, and I don’t know where he is living. In fact, when I ask about him, my uncles and aunts don’t tell me. Maybe they don’t know, but I figure someone has to.
I help my Mimi sort out some boxes in the living room. She stands next to me: “Jessie, take anything from this box that you might want.” She puts aside Boy Scout pins and Lions Club medals, which means they must be important. We throw away the bits of trash in the box—old receipts and small calendars with scribbling of meetings and dates of car shows and auctions. I try not to cry. I find a pewter letter opener with a dragon head and put it in my pocket. It looks special—like something my Pop would’ve picked up at the Williams Grove flea market on a Saturday morning. Mimi tells me she is trying not to cry, but I don’t reassure her and say “me too” or “it’s ok.” Instead I just stand there and consider taking a Dillsburg tire store pencil holder. It’s old, but I know it doesn’t have any value. I just know it’s something my Pop would carry in his pocket everywhere. I want it as a momento. (But aren't momentos for people who are dead? He's not dead!) I wonder where the hell he is that he’s not taking his pocket pencil with him. I look at my Mimi, her head down and focused, rattling on about who might want what. And I try not to cry.
My mom interrupts us and tells me that Jon needs help cleaning out the shed, so I leave Mimi to her box. I think it takes her all day to sort through it. Outside my stepdad and brother are carrying random pieces of wood and throwing it into a trailer heaped with junk. I wonder where the trailer is going or who is taking it, but all people keep telling me is that it all belongs to my grandpa. Underneath the wood I see some chairs, a mattress, a lamp. I’m confused because if the trailer is for Pop, why are they throwing junk on top of the “nice” things? It hits me: we don’t care. Well, I care. So why haven’t I called my grandpa since Christmas? I go out to carry in a load from the shed and it’s fucking freezing.
Since I forgot to bring gloves, my shed duty is short-lived. I tell my husband that I’m going back inside to do “women’s work” and I smile as I walk away because I know I’ve just made a joke between the two of us.
Inside the house, my aunts are wiping down the kitchen and cleaning out the fridge. My aunt asks me if I want a jar of olives and makes a funny face. She’s being sarcastic, but hell yeah I want the olives. I personally believe that olives never go bad and I’m very into drinking martinis. I choose a couple other things and make a pile on the counter to take home with me, alongside a picture of me and my Pop when I was a baby.
When my family is involved in any task, we usually do things at high speed. It’s like a tornado runs through town, and instead of a trail of complete chaos, your house is clean or your garage door is fixed or your carpet is installed or the hole for your new fish pond is dug up and ready to be filled. We say: “It’s the Shaffer in us.”
My mom asks me to steam clean the floors, but before I can grab the mop, Mimi stops me and asks, “Now. Have you ever used one of these things before?”
“Yes, Mimi.”
But she helps me anyway. To be honest, I’ve never filled a steam mop up, so I really did need her help.
Mimi helps me funnel water into the chamber and asks again if I’ve used one of these things before.
“I’ll be fine.”
I slide the mop over the hallway floors, and I have to admit that it’s relieving to clean up dirt even when it’s not “your” dirt to clean up. The mop pad even catches the edge of a spider web and I watch as its dusty wisps split from the wall. It’s a satisfying feeling.
Each bedroom has been emptied of furniture. I realize I haven’t been in these rooms since my grandma left my grandpa two years ago. Since then, I’ve only seen my grandpa on his porch or once when I came in he was in the sun porch living room asleep with his head slung back and snoring. I remember being a kid and always trying to tickle Pop’s nose or put hats on his head while he slept in his chair with re-runs of Hee-Haw playing in the background. He’d swing his hand around, call me a “little shit,” and I’d run upstairs to laugh.
I am almost finished with the floors. I hear my mom tell my uncle, “Jessica is busy steam cleaning,” which means I don’t have to carry something heavy or go outside again without gloves. I take my time with this job, making sure to clean every floor board with precision like I’m going to get bonus points for doing such a good job. I guess I just want to make my uncle happy—he sells houses, so clean floors make this house easier to sell.
In the living room, I have few spots to soak up since we still have a few pieces of furniture to move. I slide the mop around the edge of the room, making sure to hit the corners with extra cleaning zeal. My aunt calls out to ask if I want to join everyone for dinner—she says it’s a “thank you “ for helping on a Saturday morning. I tell her “Sure,” as I smush a frantic spider hurrying across the floor.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Writing. And mind bullets.
I'm taking a bit of a different approach to this week's blog, and I hope it is...well...okay. After assessing the various philosophies, considerations, opinions, and educated commentary regarding writing pedagogy, I have determined that to belong to any one school of thought is not for me. Although I had a hard time getting through Lester Faigley's "Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal" I will admit that I found value in his overall argument. Well, I guess you could say that found value in the theme of his argument.
What Faigley suggests is that while Expressive, Cognitive & Social views all have their "selling points," to put only one of these theories in practice in every teaching situation is probably not the best solution. I like that he recommends that "if the process movement is to continue to influence the teaching of writing and to supply alternatives to current-traditional pedagogy, it must take a broader conception of writing, one that understands writing processes are are historically dynamic" (Faigley 662). To be clear, Faigley's essay was my least favorite thing to read (sorry Julie!), but I could at least respect what he was trying to say. In fact, I enjoyed this week's readings not because I agreed with what the various authors/theorists/experts said about writing; I enjoyed the readings because I could begin to fight with the text. In my mind. With MIND BULLETS! (Tenacious D. anyone?)
I liked the fight this week. I liked that I found myself resisting the text, asking questions like:
Can expressive writing be both individually focused and socially engaging?
Can we liken to process of writing to an intellectual economy whereas writing is a means of production--we produce ideas, ideas become a commodity, we consume others' ideas to produce more ideas and if we can participate in this economy, we not only become self-actualized but also advocates for our individualism?
Let me turn around now and take-on a different persona as I respond Ken Macrorie's chapter from Telling Writing. I thoroughly enjoyed working my way through this reading--so much so, that I decided to try one of his exercises myself. Obviously, I am at a particular advantage because 1) I understand what I'm doing with a writing exercise more than the average first year college student; 2) I'm making an attempt to keep my writing "boiled down," if you will, and 3) I had an experience in mind that I wanted to write about. Despite my apparent advantages, I still have a husband who enjoys interrupting me frequently as I try to finish my homework. In other words, attempting to "write without stopping" is almost impossible in my household. Obviously what I've written in a condensed period of time is not anything earth-shattering, but I wanted to see if I Macrorie's tactics could, in fact, lead to something--anything! I wanted to see how I, as a student, responded to the exercise. What I found was that it was difficult for me to "let go" and write what I was thinking. What happens when you are trying to write AND remember at the same time? On one hand, I know I did my best at completing Macrorie's exercise, but I feel like I could do better. Why do I say this? I think that writing non-stop is something that I need to work on feeling more comfortable with. I struggled to consider my audience (and their expectations of my writing), so I know that my voice was somewhat mediated. This makes me wonder...when are we really writing for ourselves? In the classroom...are students ever really writing for themselves if (despite the subject matter, the theme, etc.) the very physicality of the room is, in fact, already chosen for them?
What Faigley suggests is that while Expressive, Cognitive & Social views all have their "selling points," to put only one of these theories in practice in every teaching situation is probably not the best solution. I like that he recommends that "if the process movement is to continue to influence the teaching of writing and to supply alternatives to current-traditional pedagogy, it must take a broader conception of writing, one that understands writing processes are are historically dynamic" (Faigley 662). To be clear, Faigley's essay was my least favorite thing to read (sorry Julie!), but I could at least respect what he was trying to say. In fact, I enjoyed this week's readings not because I agreed with what the various authors/theorists/experts said about writing; I enjoyed the readings because I could begin to fight with the text. In my mind. With MIND BULLETS! (Tenacious D. anyone?)
I liked the fight this week. I liked that I found myself resisting the text, asking questions like:
Can expressive writing be both individually focused and socially engaging?
Can we liken to process of writing to an intellectual economy whereas writing is a means of production--we produce ideas, ideas become a commodity, we consume others' ideas to produce more ideas and if we can participate in this economy, we not only become self-actualized but also advocates for our individualism?
Let me turn around now and take-on a different persona as I respond Ken Macrorie's chapter from Telling Writing. I thoroughly enjoyed working my way through this reading--so much so, that I decided to try one of his exercises myself. Obviously, I am at a particular advantage because 1) I understand what I'm doing with a writing exercise more than the average first year college student; 2) I'm making an attempt to keep my writing "boiled down," if you will, and 3) I had an experience in mind that I wanted to write about. Despite my apparent advantages, I still have a husband who enjoys interrupting me frequently as I try to finish my homework. In other words, attempting to "write without stopping" is almost impossible in my household. Obviously what I've written in a condensed period of time is not anything earth-shattering, but I wanted to see if I Macrorie's tactics could, in fact, lead to something--anything! I wanted to see how I, as a student, responded to the exercise. What I found was that it was difficult for me to "let go" and write what I was thinking. What happens when you are trying to write AND remember at the same time? On one hand, I know I did my best at completing Macrorie's exercise, but I feel like I could do better. Why do I say this? I think that writing non-stop is something that I need to work on feeling more comfortable with. I struggled to consider my audience (and their expectations of my writing), so I know that my voice was somewhat mediated. This makes me wonder...when are we really writing for ourselves? In the classroom...are students ever really writing for themselves if (despite the subject matter, the theme, etc.) the very physicality of the room is, in fact, already chosen for them?
Monday, January 24, 2011
Stewing With Ideas
I’m generally not one to brag about my talents, but I’d like to think that I make one hell of a rockin’ venison stew. Now, when I tell my friends this you can imagine that the idea of eating any kind of wild game is met with a certain resistance, mostly in the form of: “That’s gross, Jess.” or “Remind me not to come over to dinner any time soon.” 
And while venison stew may not be for everybody,I can say that I find it enjoyable to take a meat that is typically not on the menu at your average restaurant and turn it into something special—like stew. For the culinarily-inclined folks out there (yes, I think I just made up a word?), you know that making any kind of stew is fairly simple: dredge your meat in flour, then cook it in butter, throw in some broth, veggies, potatoes salt and pepper—poof! Stew. But beyond the combination of these simple ingredients, let’s not forget that our most key component to this dish is, in fact, something that has nothing to do with meat or vegetables or seasoning. You need time.
You need time to make stew, “stew." Otherwise, you'd be eating soup. I like that the name of the end product connotes its cooking process; you're eating how you made. It's nice. And satisfying.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Donald M. Murray and Lad Tobin would delight in an analogy which likens the process of cooking a (rockin' venison) stew to the process of writing. It takes time to get to a "satisfying" end product. Tobin's chapter on "Process Pedagogy" is an insightful narrative which reveals his personal teaching history and how he came to understand his craft. It is clear that he values students as writers--"that student essays[are] texts to be interpreted, discussed, marveled at, and that writing students were, amazingly enough, writers" (Tobin 6). But he didn't come to this understanding overnight or within his first year of teaching; this process took time. Like the process of understanding his own craft, a writer develops his or her own written work over time. Tobin tells us that his teaching style "was not to tell the writer where she had gone wrong or right but to help her see what she had accomplished and what the essay might become in its next incarnation" (6). The process, therefore, becomes the most important ingredient next to the (meta)physical components like words or ideas. You could argue that a good essay is most likely a product of time (written, re-written, revised, edited, etc.).
I will, again, go back to my English Composition class in college. Until that point, it had not occurred to me how magical such a thing like an essay draft could be. Unlike high school papers, I had an entire semester to turn-in a cohesive, well-thought written work unlike any I had produced before. I remember being confused. "What? You mean that we're only handing in one final draft?" And Professor Giles would smile at us and say, "Well, you'll be doing some work on it in the mean time." And by "some" he meant "enough to make you experts in your own ideas." I can't say that my high school teachers did not allow for us to have plenty of time to complete final writing pieces, but I recall feeling like I was detached from the whole process. Like Tobin suggests, the goal of my high school writing courses was to produce--to turn out writing assignments like a fast food restaurant slings burgers and fries. Which is precisely the opposite of a slow-cooked stew.
Just as a stew involves a special combination of ingredients to produce a distinctive creation, a writer will "collect warehouses of information...to produce meaning" (Murray 716). Eventually, this "meaning" is transposed like that of a recipe to blend original ideas and concepts into something truly special. Taking from Murray's distinctive style, I will turn to my favorite writer, Margaret Atwood, for inspiration as she says: "A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason." There is a reason why my venison stew is good; it's taken several tries to finally get it "right." I like that Murray warns us not to "write too soon," so that we can feel less guilty when it takes us some time to get our ideas "right." I know what when I read any assignment, I like to wait a few days and spend time thinking. I think while I heat up my Smart Ones on my lunch break. I think while I'm driving to class at night. Don't tell my boss, but sometimes I take a "thinking break" while I'm busy at my computer. There are only so many emails I can write before it becomes annoying. After I think, I talk to myself. As I've stated in class, I prefer to talk out my ideas to myself or with others before I even put pen to paper or finger to key. I have to admit that I've often wondered if I was weird or different because my "process" was not to write, but to do the opposite: to sit and think.
I am glad that I am not the only one who chooses not to write "too soon," and that I'm comfortable making mistakes on first drafts.
As our readings and class discussions have indicated, writing takes risks. Writing takes risks of making mistakes and choosing vocabulary words that are unfamiliar (like "panacea" in Tobin's essay). When I create something--a product of my ideas and offshoots of others (to reference Lynn), I am conscious that I may not get it right on the first try. But I keep trying because I know I will find the the best recipe; it is only a matter of time.
And while venison stew may not be for everybody,I can say that I find it enjoyable to take a meat that is typically not on the menu at your average restaurant and turn it into something special—like stew. For the culinarily-inclined folks out there (yes, I think I just made up a word?), you know that making any kind of stew is fairly simple: dredge your meat in flour, then cook it in butter, throw in some broth, veggies, potatoes salt and pepper—poof! Stew. But beyond the combination of these simple ingredients, let’s not forget that our most key component to this dish is, in fact, something that has nothing to do with meat or vegetables or seasoning. You need time.
You need time to make stew, “stew." Otherwise, you'd be eating soup. I like that the name of the end product connotes its cooking process; you're eating how you made. It's nice. And satisfying.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Donald M. Murray and Lad Tobin would delight in an analogy which likens the process of cooking a (rockin' venison) stew to the process of writing. It takes time to get to a "satisfying" end product. Tobin's chapter on "Process Pedagogy" is an insightful narrative which reveals his personal teaching history and how he came to understand his craft. It is clear that he values students as writers--"that student essays[are] texts to be interpreted, discussed, marveled at, and that writing students were, amazingly enough, writers" (Tobin 6). But he didn't come to this understanding overnight or within his first year of teaching; this process took time. Like the process of understanding his own craft, a writer develops his or her own written work over time. Tobin tells us that his teaching style "was not to tell the writer where she had gone wrong or right but to help her see what she had accomplished and what the essay might become in its next incarnation" (6). The process, therefore, becomes the most important ingredient next to the (meta)physical components like words or ideas. You could argue that a good essay is most likely a product of time (written, re-written, revised, edited, etc.).
I will, again, go back to my English Composition class in college. Until that point, it had not occurred to me how magical such a thing like an essay draft could be. Unlike high school papers, I had an entire semester to turn-in a cohesive, well-thought written work unlike any I had produced before. I remember being confused. "What? You mean that we're only handing in one final draft?" And Professor Giles would smile at us and say, "Well, you'll be doing some work on it in the mean time." And by "some" he meant "enough to make you experts in your own ideas." I can't say that my high school teachers did not allow for us to have plenty of time to complete final writing pieces, but I recall feeling like I was detached from the whole process. Like Tobin suggests, the goal of my high school writing courses was to produce--to turn out writing assignments like a fast food restaurant slings burgers and fries. Which is precisely the opposite of a slow-cooked stew.
Just as a stew involves a special combination of ingredients to produce a distinctive creation, a writer will "collect warehouses of information...to produce meaning" (Murray 716). Eventually, this "meaning" is transposed like that of a recipe to blend original ideas and concepts into something truly special. Taking from Murray's distinctive style, I will turn to my favorite writer, Margaret Atwood, for inspiration as she says: "A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason." There is a reason why my venison stew is good; it's taken several tries to finally get it "right." I like that Murray warns us not to "write too soon," so that we can feel less guilty when it takes us some time to get our ideas "right." I know what when I read any assignment, I like to wait a few days and spend time thinking. I think while I heat up my Smart Ones on my lunch break. I think while I'm driving to class at night. Don't tell my boss, but sometimes I take a "thinking break" while I'm busy at my computer. There are only so many emails I can write before it becomes annoying. After I think, I talk to myself. As I've stated in class, I prefer to talk out my ideas to myself or with others before I even put pen to paper or finger to key. I have to admit that I've often wondered if I was weird or different because my "process" was not to write, but to do the opposite: to sit and think.
I am glad that I am not the only one who chooses not to write "too soon," and that I'm comfortable making mistakes on first drafts.
As our readings and class discussions have indicated, writing takes risks. Writing takes risks of making mistakes and choosing vocabulary words that are unfamiliar (like "panacea" in Tobin's essay). When I create something--a product of my ideas and offshoots of others (to reference Lynn), I am conscious that I may not get it right on the first try. But I keep trying because I know I will find the the best recipe; it is only a matter of time.
Monday, January 17, 2011
The Shape of Composition
I will never forget my freshman English Composition instructor, Jack Giles. I remember him for his unassuming swagger into a room, the distinctive gray of his newsboy cap, the melody of his voice as it rose and fell like a Baptist preacher in the climax of a Sunday sermon: "…the best way to see…is to help understand…what is preventing you from seeing… through your own eyes. Always—always! Be aware…of mystification." I'll remember him for those things, but I will never forget him for the first assignment he gave us on the first day of English Comp 101.
As our un-luck would have it, our class had been assigned to one of Pitt's prestigious "cultural rooms" within the Cathedral of Learning, which meant our seats all faced forward towards the center of the room, fixed to the floor, incapable of any kind of student-inspired manipulation. I didn't actually notice how poorly designed the room was for teaching English Composition until I heard Professor Giles make a few disparaging remarks about the individual who apparently neglected to alter his initial room request. The very physicality of the room, I would later learn, could not begin to facilitate what Jack Giles had in store for us, but it would work for the first day of class.
After introductions, the obligatory syllabus interpretation, and brief introductions, he proceeded to disburse a single-sided sheet of paper to which we were to make sure remained "faced-down." "Don't even think about picking turning it over until I tell you to!" he warned. Despite my current status as a college sophomore (that's right, I put-off Comp until sophomore year because I'd dreaded the sheer thought of taking this class), the mysterious nature of our next assignment was, in fact, making me nervous. What is this weird-O up to? I wondered. Finally, after a brief explanation, we were allowed to turn our papers over and begin. This is the part that I will never forget.
Our assignment was simple. We were to read the article and write a response to illustrate whether or not we agreed or disagreed with the author's statements regarding writing. Thanks to modern technology—I mean my stunning ability to type key phrases into a google.com search menu—I was able to recover the article we read that day: "Writing Is Easy!" by Steve Martin. I won't get into what Martin actually said (you can read for yourself in the link below), but I will tell you that the point of Martin's essay was not, in fact, to demonstrate the facility of the writing process. In truth it is quite the opposite.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/06/24/1996_06_24_156_TNY_CARDS_000374389
You could say that Professor Giles' assignment was an experiment of sorts—to see whether or not we'd be able to see through Martin's sarcasm or at least be able to dispute an authority figure in spite of his ability to publish for The New Yorker. We did not know this on the first day of class, but Professor Giles' entire mission of Comp 101 was to demonstrate how students have been programmed to regurgitate information, to by-pass the process of invention in order to replicate an argument in another voice. If you had to guess whether or not my class was successful in seeing through Martin's argument, you'd be wise to assume that the majority of us failed to do so. By chance (and probably due to my affinity for cynicism), I was one of two students who was able to distinguish Martin's true meaning of his essay. The other student who had "passed," Mark, was also a sophomore who had decided to keep freshman comp for his second year. See?! We were SO smart! Or so we thought.
While I was able to delineate Martin's efforts to point out that writing is not "easy," Professor Giles reminded the entire class that the way we perceived the art of writing—and thinking—had a long way to go.
It seems as though Maxine Hairston felt the same way about the field of teaching composition when she published "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing" in 1982. Hairston points out the history of teaching writing and its inherent paradigmatic flaws. As an individual who works in a community college, I agree that teaching writing cannot be boiled down to a systematic process, especially when you mix traditional age and non-traditional age students with various skill levels and a range of cultural and educational backgrounds into the equation. You would think that it would be common sense to assume that teaching writing to a divergent group of unique individuals would require an equally diverse and flexible methodology. This is precisely, I think, what Hairston is trying to point out—that "the writing process is not linear…it is messy, recursive, convoluted and uneven" (Hairston 85). If, as Hairston suggests, writers "develop their topics intuitively, not methodically" (85), wouldn't it make sense for instructors to develop their teaching techniques in a similar fashion to fit the specific needs of the student—to support teaching as an intuitive process rather than an organized plan of action? It sounds so simple, right? While this suggestion may appear quite straight-forward, I would caution one from attributing writing (or teaching writing) as a "simple" craft. I think Hairston would agree that writing as an overall concept is far from easy or simple; it is multifaceted and complex.
I find it interesting that Hairston's essay was published exactly 20 years prior to my college English Composition experience. Indeed it seems that Hairston's plea to the world of higher education to raise the bar for teaching composition was heard by my Comp professor. I cannot speak for all 1,205 sections of English Comp at the University of Pittsburgh, (to be sure, it seemed like the pages for Eng Comp 101 in the Registrar's Bulletin went on for days), but I know that my experience resembled that of Hairston's ideal. We tackled difficult essays, mostly those written with an anti-establishment flavor, and fuddled through our own interpretation s of Freire, Berger and Bartholome. I remember using class time as "workshop" time, using each others' papers as a forum for discussion and idea-making. Now, as a proper cynic, I will never maintain that our classroom was also filled with rainbows and daisies and everything was perfect and happy. In reality, this was one of the most difficult classes I ever took in college—and let us not forget that this was freshman English Comp! Professor Giles pushed us beyond our perception of our own limitations; his goal was to assure that when we finally stepped out of his—I mean our—classroom for the final meeting time, we felt confident to approach knowledge as active participants rather than "mystified" subordinates. Indeed Professor Giles taught us not only how to shape our educational experience, but that we had the authority (and responsibility) to do so.
When it comes to composition and rhetoric, I think that North, Lynn and Hairston would agree that this process can be seen as dynamic and polymorphous, as it takes various shapes over time. North describes the study of composition as "an ever-shifting, ever-moving terrain, whose shape…is a function of where you happen to be standing" (North 6). I would ascribe this vision as the act of viewing a cube from various positions. From an aerial perspective, you might only see a cube with four sides which may represent "modes of the field," according to North. Yet, if we look at the same cube at eye-level, we can see that the same shape appears to have 6 sides with 12 edges, all which may represent "modes" of understanding the field of composition. 
Within the introductory pages of Steven Lynn's Rhetoric and Composition: An Introduction, it becomes clear—or should I say "blurry"—that defining either the term "rhetoric" or "composition" is a daunting task. However, Lynn is able to show us that linking both the practice of rhetoric with the skill of writing helps to understand how the individual demonstrates the acquisition of knowledge. Now while I say "knowledge," I do not mean that a person is not able to learn because he or she cannot write a fully-developed essay. I imagine that Lynn is attempting to illustrate that composing a written work of any form is a way in which the individual may engage, interpret, value and in his or her own culture. Indeed composition may give the individual a kind of "power." As we discuss the potential and purpose of composition, Lynn helps us identify the point where rhetoric meets composition in "the trivium": rhetoric, logic, and grammar (Lynn 15).
I recognize that I am not an expert on composition, but I took Lynn's example of the trivium in a direction which helps me understand its multifaceted nature (and shape). The obvious shape of the trivium is a triangle. You can refer to my amazing drawing skills to see figures 1-4 of what the trivium represents as a whole triangle and what it appears to be when a full side is missing from it. I'll explain each of my interpretations.
G is Grammar
L is Logic
Figure 1) This shape represents the trivium when all aspects are included: rhetoric, grammar, and logic. I attributed each side a letter with a particular purpose and intention. The ascending left side, "R," represents rhetoric and its ability to take all aspects of forming a proper argument in order to rise upward towards a higher level of comprehension. To take from Andrea Lundsford's definition of rhetoric within Lynn's text, she writes that "rhetoric is interested in building and testing theories of persuasion primarily through the symbol system of language" (see Lynn 29). In a sense, the left side ascending can be viewed as a scaffold pointing upward, suggesting that the nature of the solid line has been "built-up" to, as Lynn puts it, "[shape] language toward some goal" (13). The right side descending marked "G" is grammar. Typically one considers grammar as proper spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation. While being able to demonstrate grammar is an important aspect of writing, I would say its importance lies in the ability to use language to effectively express individual thought and feeling. If I were to spell the word house as "howse," you may be able to comprehend my thoughts if the sentence were to read: "I live in a brick howse." However, imagine that I were to change the entire sentence to read: "Ey liv in uh brik howse," you might be able to understand what I'm trying to say, but it is increasingly difficult to do so. Grammar unites us, if you will, by using a particular language structure and unified pattern of organization. If I want my thoughts to be understood by others, having a grasp upon sentence structure and spelling can only be helpful in building a composition. Grammar also helps us represent ourselves within a particular culture, either uniting or separating ourselves from a specific population. Finally, the "L" in the trivium triangle represents "logic," at it is the base of the "discourse arts." Logic is, perhaps, the base of discourse which operates as it connects both the principles of rhetoric and grammar. You may apples are better than oranges. You may have the ability to speak and write fluently in the language of your cultural upbringing to describe why you think apples are superior. However, if your passions and your ability to articulate these thoughts cannot follow a logical pattern of expression, your words and thoughts are like building a house without a stable foundation; they hold less weight and eventually the structure crumbles.
Figure 2) This figure depicts the absence of grammar, which suggests that while you may wish to convincingly express your reasons why apples are better than oranges, the inability to use organize language in a fashion which allows others to understand what you want to say leaves your argument disconnected in incomplete. In other words, a weak "side" to the trivium will not allow you to uphold your individual ability to have an opinion or engage in discourse with other individuals within your society.
Figure 3) This figure represents what it would look like if logic were absent from the equation. Assuming that logic has something to do with an understanding of culture and society, then perhaps this figure can show what it would look like if someone wished not only to voice their opinion about apples and oranges, had the ability to do so (in speech and in writing), yet disregarded the sociocultural norms of their audience. If I wanted to convince you that apples are superior because they are red, yet the audience I was speaking to highly values the color red, then my argument would simply be just that: an argument…of nonsense? I would have to appeal to some sense of logic in order for my other skills to properly convey (and convince) my audience that what I'm saying makes sense.
Figure 4) This figure represents what it looks like when you leave rhetoric out of the equation. If, as Lynn suggests, rhetoric is "shaping language toward some goal," then you could expect that language with some kind of logic is simply just that without a particular goal. I could say: "Apples are good." Grammar: check. Logic: Sure apples are good—check. And it may be your intention to simply say something. But I think that what we have to think about is using composition to its fullest potential—to explain why you think apples are good, perhaps? I guess what I'm trying to point out here is that while you may have the tools to say something and the ability to say anything, I would ask: why are you just saying anything? What does it mean? Can you back it up? To be honest, it's really difficult for me to criticize this particular figure because I can argue that composition does not have to have an intention—that you can simply write for your own pleasure and have no concern with an audience and the effect your words may have on a particular audience. However, if you think of this figure as a teacher looking upon a structure of learning, would you feel comfortable sending your students into the world of academia with the ability to say whatever it is they think without having reason to explain why it is they think the way they do? Perhaps we can see this example mostly in terms of current practices in English—where it is essential to test whether or not a student can put together words and phrases and topic sentences and then we call the end product an essay and applaud a students' achievements (yes, this was an intentional run-on). Without the process of "invention," what power do those students have as individuals? The answer is this: we train students to write, to regurgitate for the skill, not for the ability to shape their own ideas.
The key idea that I'm getting at is that the framework of composition does not just teach a student how to read and write and speak in a coherent and convincing fashion. Indeed, an understanding of composition may show us not only how to practice these skills, but most importantly, it serves as a process of thinking and sharing knowledge. Lynn nods to Donald Murray to offer some insight to the importance of writing as a way to reveal "the truth…so that he [or she] may tell it to others" (see Lynn 48). While part of me wants to believe that writing reveals the truth, I can't help but to liken that notion to a classroom full of rainbows and daisies where everything is perfect and happy. I don't know if I can believe in truth in writing (well, perhaps I can—even "truth" wears many faces), but I can believe that writing is not just a shape of language, it is also the shape of knowledge.
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