[Teaching_Composition] Rhetorical analysis of scientific research report

[Russ Hunt]

Thanks for that rich response, Neal.  As you can tell, I haven't 
stopped thinking about this. And this is really helpful (though it 
doesn't make it easy).

> One thing I'm struck by is not how 
> that group would come to their conclusions as influenced by the 
> Swift  Boat Veterans, but that there was no consequence one way or 
> the other of their final document, no larger arena of ideas to which 
> it would need to withstand scrutiny. 

Yep, yep.  Absolutely. Everything I'm trying to do here is to make 
this writing _real_ -- make it _have consequences_ -- and yet finally 
we haven't solved the problem.  What _happened_ with this piece of 
writing is that it became a bound book which was presented, at the end 
of term, to the rest of the class (and the three teachers).  But in 
that context I'm stuck with the same problem: is there some way to 
introduce the idea that this might be wrong without it being a case of 
the teacher saying, no, you're wrong, and I'm the authority?  I 
_hoped_ that someone in the class would do that during the series of 
seminars we held around the "book launches" . . . but of course, in 
the event, nobody did.

> I agree that it wasn't 
> necessarily the  role of instructional staff to challenge the ideas 
> in the final document, but the artificiality of most classroom 
> writing situations (and yours is a wonderfully crafted task) 
> precludes pushing student work out into a more public realm. 

This is dead on. But, in a way, what we're doing is, in fact, trying 
to make it "more public."  Or, more accurately, not so much more 
public as more authentic, more consequential. But "classroom writing 
situations" are (I think) pretty poisonous for this. Even when, as in 
our case, they're not designated as "writing situations" -- one of the 
things that makes this situation hard to think about is that it's 
_not_ a comp class: it's something quite diffent (and, I believe, more 
productive). It's about _the ideas_.  As somebody whose purview is 
writing, I'm trying to get them to reflect on how writing works here.

> There's no guarantee, of course, that the public realm would offer 
> the kind of challenge you were seeking, but I'm wondering how 
> potentially the rhetorical situation  could have been made that much 
> more complete.

This is a challenge, for sure. In some years we've had the students 
create a Web site, but the technical challenges often seemed to 
overwhelm the rhetorical ones, and only once or twice in the years 
we've done that has there been response from the world outside. This 
year they produced a print book, distributed to everybody in the 
course . . . but, as often happens, their colleagues took it as a 
classroom based assignment, and responded accordingly. A "classroom 
based exercise" categoricalloy constrains being judged evaluatively, 
as an "English teacher" would evaluate it. I'm still working on this 
problem.

Thank you, again, for the powerfully useful response. As Jack Benny 
once said, "I'm thinking it over."

-- Russ

Russell Hunt
Department of English
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/