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138 T EAC H In G WI T H ST U D EnT T ExT S focusing on such matters as unity, coherence, and emphasis. It is important to point out that these are categories that have changed little from the days of Brooks and Warren. But for Brooks and Warren, these categories acquired their legitimacy within a larger framework of reading that emphasized organicism, aestheticism of reading, and the transparency of language (especially in the case of exposition). In other words, their use of these terms was deliberate and strategic, and it was a powerful way of connecting the activities and writing. Since that time, different theories of reading have emerged. One would expect that different theories would yield new categories and new strategies for the teaching of reading and writing. Yet, most textbooks (there are exceptions, such as Dombeck and Herndon 2004; Harris 2006; Salvatori and Donahue 2005; Scholes, Comley, and Peritz 2000; Summerfield and Summerfield 1988) continue to employ terms like unity even though the theoretical rationale for such terms has either lost its potency or has disappeared altogether. In itself this is interesting to us, because so often the claim is made that the teaching of reading is separate from the teaching of writing. But the fact that terms like unity, coherence, and emphasis remain dominant in the discourse of composition textbooks suggests that reading is there and has always been there. To invoke an old chestnut of the eighties, to read is indeed to write, and to read, and to write. In contrast, when “process” rather than “product” is emphasized, very little reading of the student text itself takes place. Instead, the moves of student writers are narrativized so as to suggest an exemplary— and inspiring—model for imitation. The sixth edition of St. Martin’s Handbook (2008) presents an especially engaging and powerful example of this narrative transformation. In the book’s preface, Lunsford thanks the “very fine student writers” who contributed to the book, expressing particular gratitude to a single student, Emily Lesk. Emily Lesk is first referenced in the textbook in the chapter “Rhetorical Situations,” which describes an assignment she was given as a first-year student at Stanford University. We are told that her process of responding to this assignment will be followed across several chapters. A carefully honed narrative of this process begins to take shape. Emily’s initial response to the assignment was that she found it interesting. She then thought about her audience and its expectations. She realized that if she were to post her essay on the class Web site, it “might be read by anyone with access to the Internet” (39). So she expands her initial considerations of audience to include not only peers and teacher but unknown people interested in The Figure of the Student in Composition Textbooks 139 the topic: this audience of the unknown requires her to be as “clear as possible” (39). Next, Emily Lesk (in each new subsection of the book, she is referred to by first and last names, and thereafter as “Emily,” never “Lesk”) distinguished between her major and minor purposes. She thought more critically about her various audiences; she made decisions about the visuals she might pair with her words (51). In the next chapter of the textbook, we are told that Emily Lesk experimented with various prewriting strategies, such as brainstorming, freewriting, and clustering; specific examples are provided of each. We next learn that Emily needed to narrow her thesis, organize her materials , and draft her essay. The textbook presents the first draft; embedded within it are Emily Lesk’s responses to what she had written, her identification of certain trouble spots (“getting off track here?”) and ways to address them (“need to cite”). Her reflections are then summarized by Lunsford. That is to say, Lunsford interprets them for us: “The major weakness (she decided) was in tone” (79). We next learn that Emily gave her drafts to peers for review (there is a moment in which Lunsford suggests how Emily might have prepared for this stage), and the textbook includes the commentary produced by these students. This commentary is followed by Emily’s explanation of how she plans to address these suggestions, primarily in terms of organization, sentence structure, and tone. Finally we are given the revised and final draft in addition to a small photograph of Emily Lesk herself, the “student writer’ (105). Lunsford’s only recommendation, at this point, is that the readers of...

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