Course Purpose
Asking the question
When we evaluate a piece of writing, we rarely ask about what makes this "good" writing, or about how the writing works to bring audiences to feel and think the way they did. Even more challenging and rare is rhetorically adapting to be the kind of writer who could risk the attempt to make writing "good," if they can discover why it isn't.
When we begin to ask these questions, the difficulty only grows. Inevitably we must realize that to try to give an answer, we need to start thinking about what writing is and what it means to be a writer. We cannot get around that. But what if no answer you provide to explain what writing is, or that explains what makes writing good, will be final? Maybe no answer can be final because every situation in which you write or evaluate writing always poses problems that past strategies cannot easily resolve. Look back at a book or movie you've read or seen several times; or think about the time you lost a draft you had been working on for so long, and you had to start again from scratch: Each encounter with a text reveals new meanings and possibilities, mainly because we have changed--or to be more accurate, our practices of writing and evaluating have changed and are constantly changing with each new situation. This kind of learning, I say, is the most valuable, and it is the kind of learning that takes a lifetime. The context of the problemIf we were to be honest with ourselves for a moment, we might admit something: When having to explain what makes writing good, we more often than not just make our judgments based on what we already know--based on long established and unquestioned criteria--and move on, because retreating to what we already know serves to protect us from the necessary changes we must undergo whenever we go to evaluate and write beyond merely reiterating what is acceptable for us employ in order to "get by."
However, in this senior seminar we will strive to stop and linger long enough on this line of questioning, and practice answering it. We will engage in an inquiry that does not admit easy answers, which may serve to annoy many of us. But (and this is a very important "but"), in the process, you will expand the repertoire of methods of evaluation available to you, and these methods will simultaneously empower you to both evaluate and write within familiar and unfamiliar contexts. OverviewWe will be working to answer the question concerning what makes writing good, and we will do so indirectly through pursuing several smaller, more targeted questions, including:
What we will be doing
Assuming at first that you are already a connoisseur of some forms of writing, we will examine your own practices of evaluation. Then we can examine two impacts of your developed practices of evaluation: the powers your practices grant you and the ways your prior practices of evaluation might limit you.
Distinguishing your everyday practices of evaluation then will allow you to question and perhaps move beyond these limits. What you will find beyond these limits are new sets of evaluative practices you will read about in various assigned readings, such as investigating the rhetorical dimensions of texts, and what roles audience, genre, and forum play in making qualitative judgments about writing. While practicing these new sets of evaluative practices you will uncover and follow your own questions about the practices of evaluating writing. This will lead you toward developing your practical understanding of a method or methods of evaluating writing. What is expected of you?
A central promise of this senior seminar is that the practice of evaluating sophisticated and challenging texts will develop your rhetorical intelligence--the ability to be receptive to the strange and different, and to then find creative ways to revise what you already bring with you to respond effectively to these differences. Furthermore, as you develop your evaluative powers, you will also strengthen your ability to compose responsive, successful pieces of writing in a variety of genres and contexts beyond this senior seminar and even beyond the Writing Arts major.
In order to get the most out of this senior seminar, it is crucial for you to draw from your practical understanding acquired from your other Writing Arts courses, especially Writing, Research, and Technology, Writer's Mind, and Introduction to Writing Arts. You may even encounter similar (or even the same) texts and ideas you read and discussed in these earlier courses. I will assume that you will review these texts with fresh eyes and dig deeper. Furthermore, I expect you to push yourself to become a more comprehensive reader and writer who, on the one hand, is familiar with multiple genres, audiences, and writing situations, and on the other hand is willing and eager to explore and move beyond the familiar, especially as we grapple with new and challenging texts. Given these expectations, you will need to dedicate a significant amount of time preparing for our class meetings. I expect you to complete all assigned readings (often you will need to read an article or chapter more than one time to understand it on its terms, while also finding applications of the method in question). I also expect you to participate actively and thoughtfully in discussions, and to turn in all work in a timely manner. Please be prepared for in-class writing and/or collaborative work on assigned reading during most class periods. As with any course you take, you are responsible for making the most of the course in the way that makes sense for you. In any event, at the completion of this course, you should be able to extrapolate strategies and rationales from the readings and discussions that you can apply to your own writing, which is a key requisite for writing your analysis statement during your portfolio seminar. |