Reading Response: Composition and What We Need To Know

Composition was born out of rhetoric and draws life from a diverse set of sources including Cognitive Psychology, Discourse Theory, and Text Linguistics (among several others). With a diverse set of sources comes a diverse set of theories on how to best approach the subject of composition. Is it closer to scientific or closer to humanistic? Is knowledge about composition universal and verifiable or is composition entirely dialectic, requiring multiple views for any one view to gain life? As has become a trend in my responses, the answer likely lies somewhere in the middle of these dichotomies.

Before explaining my position on the scale, it is important to consider what the extremes of the scale are suggesting. Between scientific and humanistic approaches, one is considering the difference between composition practices which are either verified to exist in every situation and which can be taught as universal, or composition practices which are immortal due to their dialectic nature such that a view is never disproved but only disputed. Positioning oneself on this scale requires a few questions to be answered: is the accumulation of "best practices" scientific due to the verifiable benefit they are providing? Is teaching a universal heuristic for engaging discourse communities scientific due to its limitless application? I suppose my conclusion on this scale would have to be that the heuristic structures a teacher instills in a student can be scientific (here is how you engage a discourse community, here is how you discover discourse conventions, etc.), but those structures have to be flexible enough to accommodate a perpetually distinct rhetoric and community of readers and writers.

In a sense, the same argument is being had when you view writing as either inner-directed or outer-directed. The inner-directed theoretical camp seeks the writing processes which are so fundamental they can be universally applied, and lexical differences based on your location all stem from innate mental structures. The outer-directed theoretical camp places all language, thought, and writing within a social context. Therefore universal structures cannot exist because the communication structures are based on the ever-changing social structures within which one finds oneself. True to form, I will suggest that something in the middle is the best approach. Along the same lines as the scientific versus humanistic argument, it is all about the heuristics being taught. The end goal has to be that a student can move on without his teacher and engage any discourse community using the heuristics he was taught as long as he is given enough time. The heuristics themselves should be malleable enough to be universally applicable since the content one is approaching is always framed in the social structures and conventions native to it, but the processes one goes through are likely to look very similar regardless of the discourse community being approached.