Intended and Actual Meanings: The Case of Public Signs in the Composition Classroom

In his well-circulated-on-YouTube "slam poem" titled "What Teachers Make," the experienced secondary teacher Taylor Mali emphasizes that he "make[s] them [students] show all their work in math / And hide it on their final drafts in English" (Mali). The moment breezes along in the poem's overall, wonderfully emotional content, but the question of purposeful process ("math") versus detached product ("English") gives pause, especially in terms of pedagogical discussions about reflective practice. Is it "all good" in writing classes when, for instance, we ask for an argumentative essay but get a beautifully written personal narrative with no documented source materials? Short answer: no, but the longer answer leads us straight to what former CEA President Dr. John Shawcross calls, in another context, the "thorny question of authorial intent . . ." (18). This question is crucial in the writing classroom to what Amy Devitt calls "genre awareness" (191 ff.), but good, quick examples of genre that show the formative role played by intentionality are hard to find—until, that is, we realize that good examples are all around us.

To be sure, the issue of authorial intentionality is a kind of Forbidden Zone for literary analysis and appreciation, one that makes teachers wave copies of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's "Intentional Fallacy" as an invocation. I recall, in fact, how I myself was scolded by Dr. Shawcross for my facile agreement with Helen Gardner that, in Gardner's words, John Donne's "The Ecstasy" "smells a little of the lamp" (306). I argued, in other words, that Donne had intended to write one genre of poem but failed because he did not meet my generic expectations. Dr. Shawcross quickly disabused me of this idea: although we may infer an author's intention from rhetorical situation and biography, he said, we must be cautious in presuming too much based on such information. After all, "the proof of the pudding," as the proverb begins but then is rarely completed, "is in the eating." Most of the time, "the eating" attends to (often ideologically considered) matters of the text itself, the context of the text, or the reader's response. At the same time, a text must start somewhere, and in that point we have the continuum from intention (Point A) to text (Point B) to context (Point C) to reader (Point D), a continuum that may be usefully coupled in sets: writers have intentions, given which they produce texts; subsequently, contexts motivate how readers read. A great deal of scholarship in literary studies over the last decades has attended to the interplay between texts and contexts (Points B and C); meanwhile, rhetorical approaches to genre have, effectively, brought matters back to the causal relationship between what writers intend in terms of how they want readers to respond (Points A and D). In a 1980 article for the College Composition and Communication about intentionality, C. H. Knoblauch brings the matter to the classroom: "writers' behaviors and what stimulates them are at least as valuable as generated texts. Indeed, in writing courses those behaviors are primary, since one concern is to reduce disparities between what writers set out to do and what their completed discourses actually achieve" (155). To illustrate such disparities, we have the case of public signs—and I do not mean "signs" in the way of semiotics but actual, physical signs. Examples include placards, billboards, road signs, banners, and so forth.

Why signs? They at once are ubiquitous in our lives and instantiate a rhetorical approach to genre. Signs involve the emblematic interplay of numerals, icons, and words. Signs direct our physical lives. Signs define, direct, and delimit us. Without signs, chaos would come again. Yet, even while we need signs, we are annoyed by them and, in subtle ways, continually evaluate them. Consequently, we often feel a slight resistance to signs that is registered with an insistence on denotative precision. We are caught, in short, between what we know signs would have us understand (their intentions) and what we demand as their subservient readers. As the Canadian group Five Man...