We’re having a fruit bowl and grilled meat with friends
later. Smoke bombs, carbon snakes, etc. Maybe a trip to Parkville
for the big show, although a perceptive neighbor stopped us when we
walked the neighborhood last night and reminded us on the Fourth, it should be
called "No Parkville." Traffic’s a pain; fireworks are
bombastic.
Happy Fourth!
Witte,
Stephen. "Topical Structure and Revision: An Exploratory Study.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998.
Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 132-155.
Big Idea
Stephen Witte’s 1983 article reports on the quantifiable patterns of topical
structure in a sample of written revisions of a common text. Through
comparative readings of revised texts and a common seminal text (from which the
revisers set out), Witte’s study surmises that the reviser’s treatment of
sentence topics correlates to the writer/reviser’s understanding of the text’s
discourse topic. The relationship between a discourse topic and sentence
topic figures significantly into Witte’s work; he adopts a vocabulary of
specialized terms such as "topicalization," "theme/rheme,"
"macroproposition," and "hypertheme" in his elaboration of
methods. According to Witte, sentence topics may or may not house
discourse topics, but the writer/reviser’s prior knowledge and readerly understanding
of the seminal text’s discourse topic guides the choices applied
throughout revision. Witte acknowledges his methods are suited to
informational texts, collaboratively revised. Notably, he delivers some
eighteen-plus name references in the first three or four pages of the article (a
cluster of comp/rhet folks as well as several {unfamiliar-to-me} structural
linguists from the Prague
School).
Wondering About
With all due respect, big chunks of this essay were a muddle; lesser chunks
were interesting in a structuralism-amuck, 1983-snapshot kind of way.
Witte’s theoretical lead-in to the more empirical study sparked a few
interesting issues. Without explicitly discussing sentence topics in terms
of links and relationships, Witte is centrally concerned with
syntactic cues, their systematic connections, and the role of the writer/reviser
in reshaping those cues toward a more coherent, unified discourse topic. We
could bend this analysis to rhythm or pulse–the discourse topic’s
dependence on the coordination of smaller units. As provocative as
this is, the structuralist drawback impends: the study builds from a kind of
de-natured, de-cultured "writer’s hand(s)" (not unlike de Saussure’s
featureless talking heads). The situation is absent: topoi sans kairos.
The portions of the essay that scale the revisions from high-score to
low-score based on the sentence topic patterns (matches, deviations, etc.) were
hard to read. It’s filled with statistical references, and it’s never easy
to connect the high/low assessments to specific texts (only a few of which are
sampled). Witte notes that one of the setbacks in his study is the problem
of "no average text." In fact, the whole piece is responsibly
self-conscious; he incorporates lots of reminders that this is "an
exploratory study," and it’s simply a frame for writing researchers to
consider. But how should we use this? What other applications might
Witte’s work hold? I don’t have a lot of ideas about this, but as I read,
I started to think that much of this analysis could be applied electronically
(especially the clause-length stuff). In other words, when I want to see
revision (separated from the document), I simply use Word to compare
texts. The changes are highlighted, easy to view. I’ve never
considered the quality of a revision in terms of altered topic patterns;
instead, I simply have a glance at the depth of revision, the way the writer
responded to specific in-text suggestions or questions, and any oversights,
omissions, or clear decisions not to make changes. And while I’m
not in favor of computers as stand-alone readers, I continue to wonder how
technologies can assist our reading by helping us see patterns in texts (not to
kick out sloppily composed standardized exams). Witte’s approach, I think,
could be rendered into a software application–an application that might be
useful if we use it to see texts differently rather than measuring those texts
as successes or failures.
Witte’s approach to measuring sophistication of revisions based on topic
patterns doesn’t acknowledge rhetorical strategies, deliberate re-arrangement,
topical abstraction or exemplification. All of these forces ought to
figure into revision–even in classifiably informative texts, and studies of
topic structure alone might not reveal such developments. It also sets up
knowledge of audience and revision in fairly narrow terms. Revision isn’t
always (ever!) a sealed-off, exclusive, after-writing stage; knowledge of
audience, however carefully ascertained, is imperfect, incomplete.
Similarly, while the sentence topics can be identified and tagged, discourse
topics spill, morph, shift–endlessly. By this, I mean the sentence enjoys
punctuated boundaries; a discourse topic flows and is not frozen in time.
Passages
"Although making inferences about composing processes from written
products is somewhat risky, the method I have outlined and applied to controlled
revisions of college writers appears to be a promising one for studying the
textual causes and effects of revision. It is a method which may allow
researchers and teachers alike to study the decision-making processes writers
use during revision" (153).
"Whether the findings hold for other kinds of texts collected under
different circumstances and evaluated by different kinds of raters remains an
open question" (153).
"In this regard, topical structure analysis–unlike the analytic methods
designed to examine the effects of the revision–enables the researcher to
explore the relationship between the textual causes of revision, the text
features to which the writer as reader responds, and the effects those changes
have on the revised text" (153).
"Thus in revising the original text, the high-score writers chose to
reduce the number of sentence topics and to develop more fully those retained,
whereas the writers of the low-score texts chose to increase the number of
sentence topics and to develop each of them less fully" (153).
~muddle~ "Differences between the two sets of revisions can also be
attributed to differences in the mean number of t-units per sentence
topic. The low-score revisions averaged 1.89 t-units per sentence topic, while
the high-score revisions averaged 2.59, about 27% more than the low-score
ones" (150). ~muddle~
"The two groups’ differing constructions of the gist of the
original governed their choices of sentence topics. These different
sentence topics, in turn, led to different decisions about content which could
be deleted from the original" (149).
"But on what basis did the two groups decide which elements of the
original text to delete? I suspect that they based such decisions on their
constructions of a discourse topic or a gist for the original
text, because those constructions seem to differ in important ways" (147).
"When what is said (by the principal verbs in the text) about the
discourse topic is combined with the discourse topic, the product is the ‘macroproposition,’
‘gist,’ or ‘point’ of the text" (140).
"As I have explained it, topical structure analysis would seem to be a
useful tool for studying the textual cues which may prompt revision and for
studying the effects of revision on text structure, primarily because it
accounts for and illuminates the interaction of reading and writing during the
revision process. Topical structure analysis should enable researchers to chart
more efficiently the actual decisions writers make as they revise texts"
(140).
"Such a view of the relationship of subtopics (i.e., sentence
topics) to the discourse topic surmounts the problem of using the
orthographic boundaries of sentences and paragraphs as the principal semantic or
meaning markers in extended discourse. (Sentence boundaries can vary
independently of meaning when writers choose to produce compound or
compound-complex sentences, and I can find no evidence that writers segment
texts into paragraphs in consistent ways.)" (137).
1. Back to the box office for the anti-Fahrenheit 9/11: America’s Heart &
Soul. I hear it’s a "must see" documentary about the glee and grandeur
that is so vital to
the Fourth of July. So as not to battle the huge crowds packing into
theaters for this film, we’ll probably wait for it on DVD. I’m only
guessing, but I’ll bet there’s a scene where a cast of Iraqi sympathizers pry a
screaming Michael Moore from the jaws of Goofy. That’d be
entertaining. Nothing sends June doldrums packing like trumped up
patriotism, Disneyfied. Get the low down skinny on A H&S here
and here.
2. Marie at Blue
Ridge Blog shutter-snapped a vibrant moth (Hyalophora cecropia). Her photos
are always worth a look, especially for folks like me who might never make it to
Boone, N.C. (or who, when visiting, wouldn’t make time for the moths and
country-scape). Now, if I can just figure out how to talk Marie into
letting me have that guy’s photo for my for sidebar. Here’s the post
and repost.
It’s gotta be the most splendid moth I’ve seen, earth wide. (Okay, I confess, I
haven’t really traveled the world peeping out moths, nor am I anything of a moth
expert. I’m a Stein-quoting sham…but I would like to immortalize H. Cecropia here at
EWM.)
12…11…10 more days before I pack my office on my last day at the U.
Turning in my keys on the 16th. Been there seven years, but we’re loading up a
truck and heading East in a few weeks, winding up to the last, chilliest loop in
the rust belt. We’re all itchy with housing anxiety, since the (gorgeous,
affordable, conveniently located, perfectly kept) house in KC hasn’t sold
yet. I wonder if NASA’s
SLEUTH urban sprawl predictor can tell me when our house will sell. Stress
aside, if it’s the only thing I know, this: sometimes you have to roll with
it. We’ve got a rental on reserve in Syracuse, and, well, graduate school
is bound to financial duress. And I can always say I didn’t see America’s
Heart & Soul because I didn’t have the cash to spare (and because there’s no way Disney’s feel-good counter-documentary will comment on poor and disenfranchised folks anywhere near as cogently as Moore’s work does).
Been a few days since we rushed over to the movie house to catch Fahrenheit
9/11. Plenty has been said about it–from folks inviting the president
to view it, to Letterman’s top
ten, to Kenneth
Turan’s NPR/L.A. Times review and Jenny
and Chuck’s
insightful entries. All of this means I’m going to keep it short, mention
just two of the pieces that have been fomenting since we watched it early
Sunday.
Stark Juxtapositions: The humorous scenes weren’t enough to soak up my sense
of shame, horror, disappointment–the whole lot of nightmarish associations
volleyed throughout the two hours, playing off the dreamscape opening.
Some of the juxtapositions were plainly crushing, and so I felt sad while
watching the movie. I wonder why there aren’t more reviews on Moore’s film
as sad. Propagandistic, unapologetic, scathing, and edgily
documentary-like, but also sad. And here we are. When I left the
theater, Bush was still Commander in Chief.
Election Impact: The movie-viewing public isn’t neatly partisan, nor
would this movie have been a success if it played a milder line, with a gentler
approach to the inquiries and associations. Sure, it pushes hard issues,
and it does so in a way that will reverberate across party lines, that will,
perhaps, even redefine party lines. Why? It’s compelling stuff, I
think. F911 reveals no less than a small bundle of res ipsa
incriminations. The torturous overplay of trailers, reviews, clips, etc.
must have a relationship to the latest, and lowest-yet approval ratings (at
42%). No telling if the hum will last through November, but it’s
unimaginable that the White House can muster enough damage control to restore
Bush’s image as a competent leader(!). Then again, now that the
sovereignty or whatever in Iraq has been turned over, Bush and company can
refocus on the re-election campaign.
I really should have thrown this together right after watching the
movie. I’m sure I had more to say then. Certain! But there’s just been so
much F911-ing, and I feel a bit run down, blase.
Around Bloomsday, I picked up on a couple of interesting James Joyce
projects: Finnegans
Wake and Ulysses.
Okay, so it’s nothing revolutionary. Wait a second…maybe it is.
See, both projects are making use of blogs to cycle the e-paginations of the
respective novels. The sites run RSS feeds and disburse one page each
day. I’m not sold on the slow-release scheme for each book,
but I am pleased to see the way these blogs are bending the print paradigm into
an alternative textual system–complete with searchability, feeds, archiving,
and free access.
The Ulysses project appears to be the better automated of the two at this stage. If you check the link, you’ll see the entire novel is available in chunks and it’s cycling through on an engine of sorts, chugging through several hundred
pages, one by one over the next two years, automatically. The Finnegan’s Wake
project isn’t entirely online yet, so there’ll be no reading ahead for
now. But FW has comments enabled, so it would be conceivable to
watch discussions unfolding out of each page, not that I have any idea what
those discussions might undertake. No nubo no!
So while it might not seem groundbreaking at first (nor am I sure this kind
of thing hasn’t been done before), I want to watch how it goes. I think it
connects in interesting ways with much of the list-talk about subscription
gouging and digital models for journal distribution (subscriptions, archiving,
access, etc.), news
and entries
about feeds overhauling the browser approach to reading the web, and
transformations of biblio-traditionalisms into what’s rapidly unfolding in front
of us.
To say nothing of the nearly constant rain, we had a fine time camping at
Weston Bend State Park last night. Yeah…camping, I said. We jaunted up to the park late yesterday afternoon, hauling along a tent, a cooler, hot dogs, s’mores ingredients, bug spray and a foreboding sense that the clouds on the horizon really meant business. And they did, sprinkling overhead for
most of the night. It was a basic outing to the campgrounds:
bicycling, burning stuff, and trying to lay low, thereby avoiding the contempt
of the grounds manager who, between sucks of oxygen from a respirator, was
stunningly rude.
To put off more pressing work today, I cooked up little digimentary, a
docu-dramatism depicting our stay. It’s not as long or as essayistic as I
would like it to be, but I wanted to play around with the capture feature on my
camera and see how challenging it would be to run it through my system into a
sampler combining music, stills and video. The mixing software is an old
version of Sony Movieshaker–a standard install on this desktop. It
handled everything with ease, but I wish the audio leveling had greater
precision. Since I’m not in the market for any new software, it’ll have to
do.
A favorite camping memory: In the summers, my brother and
I would pitch tents in the yard, string extension cords to the tents, and
convene long–even overnight–sessions of C64 video-gaming (of course we set up
the computer in tent). It was a kind of portable bedroom wired to the
house; our two large outdoor dogs could come and go as they pleased while we
fought through The Bard’s Tale and Archon. One of those summers, J. slept
outdoors for a month straight.
Glenn, Cheryl. "sex, lies, and manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of
Rhetoric.” On Writing Research: The Braddock Essays, 1975-1998.
Ed. Lisa Ede. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1999. 336-351.
Big Idea
Aspasia, a woman rhetorician from Miletus–what’s modern day Turkey–stood
in an improbable role during the heyday of the rhet-charged Greek polis.
A contemporary of the patriarchy of better-historicized–Pericles, Xenophon,
Aeschines, Aristotle and Sophocles–Aspasia affected the public sphere and
contributed, with notable influence, to the votary of male officials.
Cheryl Glenn’s 1995 Braddock-winning essay, invokes mapping metaphors to suggest
gendered displacements while appropriating Aspasia a legitimate place in the
rhetorical tradition. The essay is necessarily encyclopedic; it also piles
through a fair amount of best-guesses, probabilities and likelihoods in a
successful attempt to carve out historiographic room for Aspasia.
Glenn’s work situates Aspasia in the context of heavily patriarchal rhetorical
tradition. In doing so, she exposes openings and possibilities in
the sketchy historical record, and ends with a call for ongoing re-readings of
the rhetorical tradition that ask questions about representation, absence and
silence, and that accept Aspasia as a beacon for modern feminist scholarship in
rhetoric.
Wondering About
My foothold in classical rhetoric is shaky at its most stable. Reading
"sex, lies, and manuscript" helped me see the tradition as a contested
realm, and the trick for the scholar of classical rhetoric–it seems–is to
explore the nebulous areas, to inquire about what’s missing and why, and to see
the tradition anew by refreshing it with now-relevant questions. It’s
clear I need to spend more time with B&H’s The Rhetorical Tradition;
I’ve plans to crack it later this summer.
The "sex, lies, and manuscript" reference gets explained later in
Glenn’s essay (or is it in the afternote?). I never saw the movie sex,
lies, and videotape, so the allusion was a stretch. I think it
might have come across more resolutely for readers ten years ago, but the
reference didn’t seem adequately sustained, sufficiently built-in for
me–especially for the juxtaposition of manuscript and videotape.
Probably would make better sense if I checked out the movie, eh?
I wondered how differently each of the characterizations–"[one who]
ventured out into the common land, [one who] distinguished herself by her
rhetorical accomplishments, her sexual attachment to Pericles, and her public
participation in political affairs"–rolled together to give Aspasia a
single sense of persona. For that matter, did Glenn find these overlapping
identities competing? Manipulable? Exclusive? It’s not easy to say
with precision, but especially in the places where Glenn needles at Pericles’
legitimacy (suggesting, basically, that "Aspasia surely must have
influenced Pericles in the composition of those speeches that both established
him as a persuasive speaker and informed him as the most respected
citizen-orator of the age" (342)), I had the sense that the unverifiability
of it all encroached on Glenn’s argument. And, of course, I recognize that this
also points to an imperfect historical record and the difficulties of writing
across +/- 2,500 years.
I picked up a few terms that I’d heard before (some of them, anyway), but
that I hadn’t explored lately: arete and homonoia. As
Glenn casts them, arete tends toward an elite sense of governance by
virtue–a kind of oligarchic/aristocratic democracy, whereas homonoia
called for virtue by all, no matter gender or social class, for the good of the
entire democratized polity. According to Glenn, "Thus was manifested
the complex tension between the elitist arete and a more democratic homonoia.
Another useful term was panhellenism, which points to "a doctrine
sorely needed to to unify the Greek city-states, just as it satiated the male
appetite for public display." The term is used in a way that might
allow something like diversity or heterogeneity (especially in
relationships, I guess) stand in its place. And the last noteworthy term
is consubstantiality. The funeral orations aspired to this
attribute of consubstantiality, which basically means that the experience–the
rhetorical effect–would be replicated throughout time, so "the shared
experience of this rhetorical ritual linked [!] everyone present even as it
connected them ‘with other audiences in the past’ (Mackin 251)"
(344). Consubstantiality. Consubstantiality.
Passages
"Such challenges not only restore women to rhetorical history and
rhetorical history to women, but the restoration itself revitalizes theory by
shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study" (336).
"When other women were systematically relegated to the domestic sphere,
Aspasia seems to have been the only woman in classical Greece to have
distinguished herself in the public domain" (338).
"By every historical account, Aspasia ventured out into the common land,
distinguished herself by her rhetorical accomplishments, her sexual attachment
to Pericles, and her public participation in political affairs"
(339).
"The Menexenus contains Plato’s version of Socrates’ version of
Aspasia’s version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, further recognition of Aspasia’s
reputation as rhetorician, philosopher, and as influential colleague in the
Sophistic movement, a movement devoted to the analysis and creation of
rhetoric–and of truth" (344).
"Jarratt explains the sophistic rhetorical technique and its
social-constructionist underpinning with her definition of nomos as a
‘self-conscious arrangement of discourse to create politically and socially
significant knowledge…thus it is always a social construct with ethical
dimensions’ (60)" (345).
"Our first obligation, then, as rhetorical scholars is to look backwards
at all the unquestioned scholarship that has come before; then, we must begin to
re-map our notion of rhetorical history. By simply choosing which men and women
to show and how to represent them, we subtly shape the perceptions of our
profession, enabling the profession to recognize and remember–or to forget–the
obvious and not-so-obvious women on our intellectual landscape" (349).
Following the Lewis
& Clark re-enactment? Me either, but for their reservation to stay
the night in one of the gymnasiums on campus this weekend. After the
initial request, they got the Old Gym: Labor Hall. One room, 94′ long. It’s
historically appropriate–dusty, bugs, cobwebs. What…rustic accommodations
won’t do? The re-enactors prefer the air-conditioned gymnasium for the
weekend? Just as well. Nobody else is cooling off in there. To
the river’s source!
The mighty-meta tug-o-war on techrhet last week whipped up quite a
storm. It’s lain quiet again, for now, pending reloads and recalculations
I suppose. I didn’t jump in because I was busy in N.M.; it was all I could
do to keep up with reading the threads, and as much as it stimulated in my own
thinking about why blogs enable something different than I’ve seen
before, I kept cool, not knowing the antagonizers and button-pushers from the
from the trumpsters or the trumpeters from the analogs or the analogues from the
bots–no disrespect intended. Single-channel lists: wash cycle hot bleach
and mixed colors swirling.
I started blogging because the lists often fall dead silent or explode in a
frenzy of over-action cum clog. It’s not an either-or dilemma between
lists and blogs, of course, and I still lurk on a few lists in an attempt to
keep up with what all the brilliant, well-established folks, the makers of list
culture have to say. A blog, however, is a different kind of home.
Plus, I wanted to give it a try, write more often–whatever I wanted, in a space
where I could tap into what others were saying and where they could tap into
what I was saying. Tap!
I sipped a few beers last night–going away beers–with a blogger and two
non-blogging academic folks. Four of us. We talked a lot about the
futures of blogs as legitimate scholarship, tech-enabled publishing
alternatives, the connections enabled in spite of distance and time and (even
more monumental) disciplinary partitions. Although I won’t go to
great lengths to parade statistically-based or empirically sound proofs of the value
(rounded to the nearest decibels) of blogs in composition, I will give a
nod to these inferences (as in, take what you will):
Well, I tried. That’s all I have to say about weblogs for now. I
was noticing–disturbing as it is–that my "On Weblogs, On" category
was crusting and falling behind the other categories. So I needed to carry
on about blogs.
My infrequent posting are explained by a new pile of work at work.
Since my official letter of resignation didn’t get circulated far and wide, it’s
taken word of mouth to spread the news that I’m leaving the U. in less than a
month. With that, I’m in on a whole docket of meetings–including another
pair of search committees tomorrow. Mission: replace myself.
Tackboard: Sell the house that hasn’t sold, scrap through online stuff, scratch
that itch to see F 9/11
[link via IA]
this weekend, plunk out notes on Glenn’s Aspasia, mow
the front grass. Well, yeah, and see which forum gets full fastest.
Happy Father’s Day, Pops!
I hope J. was suggesting that the bottle goes in my mouth, not my ear. And
no, that’s not my index finger I’m waiving around. (Sorry–no clue who I was
giving the bird at <2.) [Idea for photo-posting on Father’s Day with
gratitude to Krista at Arete]
