Odell, 1980, "Needed Research in Discourse Theory"

 Odell, Lee. "Teachers of Composition and Needed Research in Discourse Theory." On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998. Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin's, 1999. 84-92.

Big Idea
Lee Odell argues for yet-to-be-done composition research as of 1979.  He contends that we must not only be practical and pedagogically centered, but we must also shape discourse theory and adapt it to benefit students.  His premise rests squarely on the basic notion that theoretical investigations in composition must always return to practical matters, to pragmatic application in the classroom on Monday morning.  I'm not certain how long before Odell's 1980 piece the Monday morning question became a fixture in composition studies.  "How will you use this to teach?" was often bandied about by some of the practice-heavy folks in my MA program.  It's a line of thinking that somehow characterized the useful and worthwhile queries as ones that can be proven to funnel toward students' proficiencies in writing.  Unless it shapes student writing, it's fluff, abstraction (or that's the script, anyway).  Odell's brief article starts with a push away from Kinneavy's Aims of Discourse; he faults the aims for their overemphasis on product at the expense of attention to the series of choices reflected in a student text.  Odell thinks composition folks should investigate student choices by engaging in comparative readings of drafts, redirecting student projects through revisions toward "different purpose[s] and appeal[s] to a different audience," and by enlisting students to explain--even through tape-recorded narratives(!)--their own choices while writing. Odell suggests advantages in comparing unassigned student writing (writing done for non-academic purposes) to assigned student writing.  How, for example, do styles vary when the writing is subjected to the forces inherent in the institutional arrangement?  Because we can be sure student writing performance varies, we must acclimate our evaluation methods. Odell's case aspires to getting inside why students do what they do when they write and understanding full well how our own work affects what they do.

Wondering About
This is a brief little article, under ten pages.  It reminded me about one of the research interests of a professor in my MA program.  He contended that one of the first orders of business in teaching composition was to come to terms with the thing that governs students' sense of essayism. He supposed a kind of accumulation of essayistic force compelled many students to write mechanically, guided by their overpowering sense of what an essay is (often conditioned by years of Thou Shall Not's) rather than what the specific language in the prompt asks them to do.  In these terms, students' choices aren't always affected by consciousness, choices aren't always easy to articulate, decisions aren't always precise or simple.  And I wonder if the same is true for more experienced, even professional writers.  Must we always be able to explain choices?  Is every articulation governed by a choice?  Is it possible for unchosen (free, unrestrained, accidental) articulations to achieve a desired aim or must the entire writing process be underscored by choice after choice in pursuit of an explicit aim?

Along these lines, Odell's essay sent me reminiscing about a hard camp-line in my MA program.  The line basically divided those who held that, in fairness, instructors must account for the entire semester's plan at the outset of the term of study.  Students should be able to look ahead;  proper planning by the instructor ensures a more organized semester and, as a result, the course will come off as more polished, more coherent.  Over on the other side (Me? Oh, back then I straddled.  Good MA students avoid the wrangling, stick to the middle.) were folks who contended that we cannot know where what the next assignment should be until we've read the one before it.  It was more in line with responsive pedagogy--the kind that accepts that we need to improvise, bend the curricula to our students who vary from term to term, and allow for contextual factors to steer the course rather than proceeding from an inflexible master plan.  How does this connect with Odell?  I think his work here supports a version of the second approach, the loose and responsive plan.  After all, he argues that we must get to know our students and, in doing so, realize that effective pedagogies are fine-tuned to specific students.  

It makes sense that composition instructors should care about un-assigned student writing.  Digital media have given us greater access to unsolicited writing done by students; we can read weblogs and participate in chats without getting wrapped up in institutional dynamics.  But what other sources of un-assigned writing are there?  Where might we look harder at writing done by students outside of academia?  Why are they writing?  How might our writing curricula navigate the assigned-un-assigned binary for the betterment of everyone involved (including the assessors, accreditors--who unfortunately matter)?

Notably, several of Odell's methods for getting to know the choices students make when writing strike me as incredibly laborious.  Tape-recording?  Reading multiple drafts and attempting comparative readings of multiple drafts is challenging, but listening to students' voice-recordings explaining the choices they've made in a particular essay draft seems impossible.  Could be my own sense of appropriate pace and workload, but I can't imagine attempting more than two essays in a sixteen-week semester if multiple stages and careful interrogations of choices were part of the plan.  At times, I have used MS Word's document comparison feature to read revised essays against their predecessor, and although it doesn't come with a student narrative about specific choices, it does reveal patterns and lend insight to the scope of changes being applied between drafts.  I can also see the use of a discussion of choices when conferencing with students.  I've never tried it, but I am curious about the experiences of folks who have used voice-clip inserts to comment on student writing (in the mix of text-based comments, perhaps).  And I suppose this comes close to one of the recent discussions on the WPA list about the writing assessments used by UPhoenix where, because of the burden of responding to student writing, human readers are teaming up with machine readers--layering computer and teacher--toward a two-part rendering of response to student writing.  It's not exactly what I had in mind when I wrote about collaborative commenting a few months ago, but it churns up some interesting (disturbing, exciting) possibilities.   

Passages
"One basic assumption in current discourse theory is expressed in James Kinneavy's claim that purpose in discourse is all important" (85).

"A second major assumption in current discourse theory is that different writing tasks make quite different demands on writers" (86).

"The writing of our students represents a kind of information that is almost impossible to obtain in any context other than a course that is primarily concerned with students' writing" (84).

"Whereas we once could use a single, widely-agreed-upon procedure for evaluating all the writing done in a given mode, we may now have to use a variety of evaluation procedures, most of which we have to create for ourselves" (88).

"When our colleagues complain to us that we're not teaching students to write, they often mean that they're tired of seeing misspelled words and sentence fragments" (89).

"If it is true that students are likely to be more successful with one sort of writing task than with others and if it is true that we must vary our evaluation procedures according to the specific writing task at hand, we may have to make substantial changes in the way we assign and evaluate writing" (90).