TIRP 2 - Daniel Bell

 The Inculcation of Purpose

I took my first college composition course in the Fall of 2013. It was an ENC 1145 class, taught by a creative writing Ph.D candidate named Jake Kelly. The special topic of the course was "writing about the rhetorically taboo." The material was centered around an examination of taboo subjects in American culture -- what designated them as 'taboo' -- and then learning to write about them in a thoughtful, critical way. In this course, the study of the 'taboo' was used as a vehicle for learning how to write. However, it was my first encounter with college level, academic writing, complete with it's own terms and conventions that I had never interacted with before. It was a process of instruction that caused me to consider the question, 'why do I write?', for the first time, and prompted me to explore and consider what writing is, what it can accomplish, and what is the process by which it is created.

According to David Bartholomae, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, our writing is dictated by the standards of the community we are writing for. The idea at the heart of his widely circulated essay, Inventing the University, is that we live in a world of individual "discourse communities"; each with their own unique and specific set of standards. In order for us to be successful writers, we must adopt the unique rhetoric of the audience we are writing for -- appropriating the terms and language of an environment we are not originally a part of. In short, we must 'invent the university' every time we write. This process of adoption can pose a great challenge to new writers, who are not even aware that there is a code of discourse they have to adopt -- let alone address an expert audience with any semblance of ownership or authority. He summarizes this idea in the following passage:

"What our beginning students need to learn is to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into to the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the "what might be said" and constitute knowledge within the various branches of our academic community."
 
However, getting a hold of this "what might be said" can be a very difficult process for students. My first introduction to the demands of this process came with the first essay that I had to write for ENC 1145. Our first assignment was to look at stand-up comedians, and analyze how they operated as rhetoricians within the context of the 'taboo'. I chose to focus on the use of the 'N-word' in modern, popular stand-up comedy; namely, how certain white comedians get away with using it on stage, while others do not. With that, I focused on a set that American comic Bill Hicks performed in the early nineties about the role of the LAPD in the Rodney King trials.

Mr. Kelly, being a, well-intentioned man, attempted to ground our discussion of the taboo within the context of certain terms -- ethos, logos, pathos; rhetoric; exaggeration (as a rhetorical device). In retrospect, this was a very elementary introduction to discourse analysis, but he wanted us to be able to think in these terms, and moreover, to let these thoughts take hold in our writing in a way that allowed us to be a part of a conversation. Immediately, my attempt to enter into this 'world' created by my instructor is evident in my thesis statement:

"The intention of this essay is to examine how Bill Hicks intertwines his persona, exaggeration, and rhetorical methods, in order to justify using one of the most culturally taboo words in the English Language in a way that does not embarrass himself or alienate his audience." 

 

Persona. Exaggeration. Rhetorical methods. Later in the essay I mention how Hicks uses logical appeal, to get the audience on his side. My use of these terms was an attempt to appropriate a language that my instructor designated to be native to the "discourse community" of the composition course that he was teaching. I approached the essay through the lens of the values and schemata that he expressed as important. This is not how I naturally write. This may not even have been an essay I would have written otherwise. However, I wrote it on the basis that I was entering into a conversation, and inherent in that conversation were certain commonplaces, rhetorical expectations, and ideas that Mr. Kelly (the audience) set forth for the class to follow -- a sense of  "what might be said".

Bartholomae's discussion of why and how we write, however, is only half of a conversation (if that). The other half lies implicit in a phrase that I used earlier in this essay: "This is not how I naturally write". According the Bartholomaeic ideal of discourse, there is no such thing as a 'natural writing' -- or rather, that since writing is done on the basis of "discourse communities" and rhetorical appropriation, the idea that one could 'write naturally', or that writers have an innate voice that they express, is illogical and counterproductive. According to Bartholomae, writing is simply about the representation of discourse, and your level of success as a writer is contingent on how well and authoritatively you can enter into that conversation.

However, that is not how it feels when I write. It does not feel like I am simply "appropriating discourse", but rather, speaking my personal voice through the lens of a subject -- in this case, Bill Hicks. There is a sense of creation -- of birth -- that comes with writing. There is an elegance and an art to it that I find to be enormously fulfilling. There is a sense of personal aesthetic that, regardless of audience, is innately present in everything I try and write. It is not something I can isolate and explicate; it is style as a goal -- as a means of rhetoric, and it is present in the Hicks piece as it is in everything I have written since.
  
This contrast between writing as a means of personal expression, and writing as a representation of a certain dialogue, is evocative of the debate John Dewey addresses in Nathan Crick's Essay, Composition as Experience. The position Dewey takes approximates very closely the way that I approached writing the Hicks essay, and my approach to writing in general. In it, Crick examines Dewey's Pragmatic philosophy of composition through the lens of the dualist debate on writing between David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow; an expressivist who believes that writing is primarily the product of inner mental processes, and that language is a goal unto itself. In the essay, Crick describes how Dewey refutes the dogmatic, dualist assertion that writing is either wholly representational or cognitive. Rather, Dewey describes it as being a combination of both. Crick summarizes the crux of Dewey's argument in the following passage:

"The vision of composition that emerges from Dewey is grounded on a relationship of experience and communication that is mediated by the practice of mind. In other words, this means that we must pay equal attention to the craftsmanship of language and the emotions that drive our acts of self-expression and self-creation."

We see here an emphasis placed on the importance of experience in order to relate to certain discourses. Meaning, that in order to meaningfully interact with "discourse communities", and properly relate to your audience, communication requires an adequate transaction of the experiences that define you as an individual, to your writing. You must actively apply your mind to the discourse. In my writing of the Hicks essay, I had always loved and admired Hicks as a comedian. Out of this, I applied my knowledge of why I liked Bill Hicks' work -- and my experience as his admirer --  within the confines of the discourse that Mr. Kelly was fostering through the class. When applied in such a way, writing becomes full and dynamic; alive, and in the hands of a better master, art.