In response to Brittney's, "Revision, Re-Vision"

         The problem with peer critiquing or revising in general is what constitutes good or bad revision I think. There is most definitely a difference between the two. For example, in my undergrad studies I had a professor who would let us revise any one paper that we wrote throughout the semester. We get one revision and one only. If you turn in a paper that has little or negligible revision, she retained the right to fail your paper no matter the grade. If you turned in a revision and it actually lowered your grade, you had to stick with it.

        While being a very harsh way to deal with revision, it really made the person think about what they were doing when trying to up a B to an A or a C to a B. She rarely, at least in my experience with talking to her about the policy, got back revisions that were frivolous or non-existent and in the process was probably creating better writers. I think when determining how students should revise and peer critique we have to consider telling them that there is such a thing as bad revision. Some students can catch other students' bad revisions and help them, but a lot of the time it takes the guiding hand of an experienced writer to help them see where and why they need to revise.

An Idea in Invention

Invention as a Process

        Is invention inherent in all of our writing? The answer is yes. We all in some way shape or form "shape" our utterances. When we write we have the time to process and think about what goes on the page. A very prominent theory or argument is that writing in itself is secondary to speech because of how utterance works. For example, when an orator speaks, he only has enough time to construct what he believes or knows off the top of his head. Some argue that this is primary utterance. The secondary utterance comes when we sit and we write. It does not matter what the writing entails. All that matters is that we have the time to contemplate and shape what we say. Writing does not come naturally, I will argue, to the human being. It is something that is crafted and learned. Can anyone be a writer? In a sense, yes. Can anyone be what would be classified as a "good" writer? That's debatable. I think I fall on the side that writing is a secondary utterance. I do not think that invention and our own process of writing comes as naturally as speaking to one another in conversation. The implications this has for composition and pedagogy is knowing that the invention process for different people comes at different levels. Some students learn visually as a process for writing, others learn by doing. These articulations in the differences of the invention and writing process enforces the idea that writing is secondary to speaking. How as instructors do we standardize that process for students? It is virtually impossible, but we can cater to those who learn differently in the classroom to some extent. Scott was saying in class he gave students who wanted to take different routes the opportunity to do so. This promotes growth and confidence in students that I think is vital in bolstering the shaping of their own secondary utterances.

Audience

Audience Balance

        As we talked about on Tuesday, I'd like to take a look back at what audience means to me and how I think it affects my field. As a TCR Master's student I'm told all the time that what I write and who I write to are tangible things. However, in the past few weeks I've had to reconcile my differences with audience as opposed to the standard view of TCR. Ong talks about the fictionalized audience that is created whenever a writer writes. He is specifically targeting those who write creatively, however, it definitely ties in to TCR. We think, as TCR people, that we are always writing to the real people who read our manuals, sites, etc. But do we know them personally? Can we accurately predict all of those people who will use our documents? The answer is no. We can, to some extent, gather date on who we are going to be writing to, but we cannot pinpoint our audience as a whole. This idea that we have to invoke and also address our audience is the key in making our field more accessible and more practical than it already is. Without striking a balance between the tangible and invoked we, as instructors and scholars, cannot actively participate in a discourse in or out of the classroom. To some extent, we all have to come to terms with the fact that we will have to generalize our audience to some extent and hope that our point comes across in the writing that we wish to make.

The Great Kairos Situation

Kairos and Composition

        In class over the past week we talked about many rhetorical roots that fit in to the rhetoric of our field and the field of composition. I feel though, that we kind of glossed over the entirety of kairos completely. We did a group project about kairos, but I'm not sure that everyone was 100% sure what a "kairotic" situation exactly was. In essence, kairos is the appropriate time to deliver some sort of rhetoric. Now, some people would confuse this with chronos, except chronos deals more with the passage of time rather than the appropriateness of time as kairos does. A big example is Obama's famous "Hope" speech he gave before he was first elected in 2008. If you read the transcript for his speech and hear his delivery he touches on a lot of things that were "appropriate" for the time. One of these things were the minority groups of the time and how they are the legacy that holds a family afloat in the future concerning the unemployment rate. He had done this on purpose to make a rhetorical situation relevant and personable to the audience in which he was aiming to get votes from. It was also kairotic in history because he was the first black man to even run for president, let alone win it. So his speech took on an MLK-esque quality in delivery and format because that was what was appropriate for the time.

       In class, we were told to respond appropriately to a certain situation involving our first year composition course. While I think this was a good exercise for those who understand the use of kairos in rhetorical situations, I don't know if everyone got it. How does this apply to composition as a whole? Kinneavy had some great ideas on how we could incorporate, or how we should incorporate, kairos in to first year programs. I think Kinneavy's idea is in line with my own in this situation. He says that we should incorporate the appropriateness in to the curriculum. So say, an engineer is in the course. Why not have this engineer do writing assignments that include his field? At that point in time it is probably the most kairotic thing he/she could be doing without realization. This would also help with other departments wishing to splinter the composition programs because they think they can do it better. It's not that they can do it better, it's that they are trying to implement a kairos in to their program that they think is not present in current composition programs. If the field of composition can develop assignments that are general, yet kairos specific at the same time, I think that all of this splintering would slow down and eventually stop. Is it 100% possible or probable? I don't know. However, kairos plays a huge part in our field and any field that requires a certain appropriateness for success.