The End of Composition Studies

1. What Is Writing and Writing Ability?

17 Think of the tools in a tool box: there is a hammer,pliers,a saw,a screwdriver ,a rule,a glue-pot,glue,nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.(And in both cases there are similarities.) Of course,what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print.For their application is not presented to us so clearly. —Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations When we say:“Every word in language signifies something”we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we have explained exactly what distinction we wish to make. —Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations 1 WhatIsWritingandWritingAbility? THE LIMITS OF COMPOSITION STUDIES begin with its subject: writing . Just what does the word “writing” mean, this word that can refer not only to a set of symbols on paper or computer screen but also to the process of putting them there or even what we have to know, what we have to be able to do, in order to put them there? Is there any single answer to this question ? And if there is no single answer to the question of what writing is, how do we know what we are supposed to be teaching when we teach writing? In general, composition studies has not taken seriously the conceptual difficulties involved in deciding just what writing is in the first place. Historically , the field has conceptualized what we mean by “writing” beyond the sentence level in a number of ways. Each of the following formulations had a certain currency during a particular period and then was succeeded by another formulation: the textual rules and conventions of various forms of discourse; a composing process, a cognitive process, a rhetorical practice —that is, sensitivity to the elements of those exigencies that call for a written response: a particular rhetorical situation or context, the audience or readers the writer must address, the genre forms which seem most appropriate under the circumstances—and finally, the currently most popular concept, a social or cultural phenomenon. Of course, all of these ways of conceptualizing writing capture some aspect of what we mean by some kinds of writing: all kinds of writing do seem to require a knowledge of rules and conventions, although the rules and conventions of personal diaries and private notes might be difficult to characterize. All kinds of writing do seem to require the ability to compose in a systematic and self-conscious way, although freewriting is designed to 18 Conceptual Limits bypass conscious thought and help writers put words on the page spontaneously . All kinds of writing do seem to require an awareness of the constraints inherent in a particular rhetorical situation, although scholars have found it notoriously difficult to characterize just what writers know about their purposes, how self-conscious they are about genre conventions, and how much they assume about their audience in any given case. And finally, all kinds of writing do seem to require that writers participate in a larger social or cultural matrix, although many kinds of writing are done for very private reasons. What I am getting at, of course, is that the term“writing”refers to a great many different kinds of activities, that writing is done in many different ways: general formulations about the nature of writing ignore very real differences in the kinds of rules and conventions, composing processes, cognitive processes, rhetorical practices, and social phenomena that may apply in different rhetorical circumstances. The problem is not that these various conceptions of writing are untrue or inaccurate or misleading or unhelpful—nor is it that they contradict one another; they do not—but that they are necessarily concerned with writing at a very abstract level. They all necessarily tend to ignore the fact that people write in many different ways in many different kinds of contexts for many different reasons. When people write, they engage in very specific kinds of thinking and behavior that are very dependent on the particular situations in which they find themselves. The question then is whether all acts of writing do have something in common—whether for example writing may be analogous to the common-sense concept of intelligence, as problematic as that term is—or whether we simply use the term to refer to many different kinds of activities . In the terms of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the question is what the term “writing” means in its various uses and how these...