Connoisseurship and Criticism
In our inquiry into what it means to be a connoisseur and a critic, we worked to distinguish between two kinds of “knowing”: knowing “facts” (episteme) and knowing “how” (phronesis—the rhetorical intelligence we exercise when engaged in action with others, where there is no formula for certain success), and we determined that evaluation has more to do with the latter.
To be a connoisseur is just one half of the evaluative process; the other is to communicate the qualities one has discerned to a specific audience. To be an evaluator of writing, then, you need to develop yourself in two ways: as a connoisseur of writing and as a critic. One must have the receptivity to undergo the experience a particular artifact of writing calls for and one must have the ability to distinguish how best to share how that artifact of writing works to a particular audience. Of primary importance is for the evaluator of writing to get grounded within an evaluative situation, where several things need to be present:
The first important step to reflect on here is your own connoisseurship and critical practice. Keep thinking about the gap between your current practices of evaluation and these new methods we are studying together.
What is the "common sense" you already belong to? What are the values, norms, and qualities (evaluative criteria) you already use? How do these customary evaluative criteria power (and where), and what limitations does this pose to you as an evaluator? |