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Janet Emig Annotated Bibliography Articles

Journal Articles (Chronologically)

---. “We Are Trying Conferences.” The English Journal, 49.4 (Apr. 1960) 223–228.

This article is one of Emig’s earliest, when she was teaching high school in Wyoming, Ohio. The school district was discouraged because the recent graduates who moved on to college were struggling in their Freshman Composition classes. In an effort to aid future graduates, the school district created a daily schedule of four classes, rather than five, for each teacher. This decreased the number of students each teacher had in class and also allowed the teachers to have conference time to spend with students, one-on-one, providing the students with an opportunity to have positive feedback and constructive criticism. The teachers also gained time to individualize the writing of each student and become aware of the student’s improvement in select areas. This shift in the schedule was an attempt to prepare sophomore, junior, and senior students for the various kinds of writing they would confront in college. Grades were de-emphasized while the comments written by the teacher were the prime focus of the conference time. These allowed students to track their improvement and note areas where improvement was needed. The advantages noted by Emig were that discipline issues were minimal because student and teacher had ample time to interact and form bonds and it was easier for the class to “move together because in the conference we can deal with individual misunderstandings that once slowed down an entire class”(228).

The article/chapter focuses on the rhetorical origins for each individual, not the origins of rhetoric in society. Emig suggests that “very early developments in the personality and in the perceptions of an infant are prerequisites or precursors to certain features and practices of mature rhetoric”(56). Perhaps because these behaviors and habits develop at such an early age, “rhetorical behaviors will not yield to the kinds of intervening we have classically called teaching composition – giving assignments, reading products, and requesting or demanding major or minor reformulations of revisions”(57–58). She cites studies by Brown and Bellugi who state that mothers, in the early verbal years, serve as translator and model; the mother relays information from the child to an audience and in creating sentences to convey what the child is trying to say, acts as a model from which the child can learn. Composition teachers, when the student is preparing to write or revise, can act as the model, translator, and audience to help the student improve his/her writing skills, which will lead to advanced communication skills.

“An inquiry paradigm then is the explanatory matrix for any systematic investigation of phenomena”(159). To qualify as an inquiry paradigm there are certain criteria. A governing gaze, which is a “steady way of perceiving actuality”(160) meaning our view incorporates our experiences and expectations. There are three types of gazers – positivistic, phenomenological, or transactional. Emig examines the positivistic and phenomenological. The positivistic gazer is scientific, paying little attention to subjective matter. A positivist assignment is “one that does not emanate from the student writer nor from the students’ prior writing”(163). A positivist examines phenomena without contextual constraints and can claim universality. A phenomenologist gazer, on the other hand, considers context a key source of information when seeking to explain phenomena, the perceiver’s vision of the world is necessary. Our perception of reality is not finite, there is always room for more explanation. Phenomenological inquiry is more personal than a positivist gaze, utilizing case studies and ethnographies. Emig explores the idea of theories, specifically looking at Bruner and Kelly. She emphasizes that we must know our theory of writing and our tradition, for “it could be said that those who neither know nor acknowledge their intellectual origins are the true bastards of the world”(166). Why do this? A mature paradigm is needed to judge inquiries as sufficient and there should be a criteria for evaluators to consult to be effective.

“Here I have a prior purpose: to describe as tellingly as possible how writing uniquely corresponds to certain powerful learning strategies”(122). In this article written in 1977, Janet Emig strives to connect the act of writing with other modes, such as reading, talking, and listening. Her attempt to differentiate and define these modes is categorized by whether the act has the writer/speaker/talker originating or recreating the information, and whether a graphic representation coincides with the mode. She states that listening and reading are both receptive, while writing and talking are productive. Writing is the process of creating something that can be recorded in a graphic manner. Reading is a mode that is creating, but not necessarily originating. Listening is creating or recreating something verbal that is not graphically represented, but it is not originating. Talking is creating and originating without graphic representation. Emig cites psychologists such as Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner to solidify the connections between the various modes and how learning can affect writing. “Writing involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and the right hemispheres”(125). Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, in their introduction to Emig’s essay within Teaching Writing: Landmarks and Horizons, credit Emig’s essay with “helping to authorize another major project of composition: the writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement”(44).

In this memorial, Emig recalls her friendship with the late scholar, and Shaughnessy’s view of the West. Shaughnessy’s “West was-a lush corner in a beige prairie state, near the moon surface of the Badlands; a corner in which a herd of 200 bison can still amble or rumble across the vision; where wild ponies block a car”(37). Emig traces Shaughnessy’s move east, to school in Chicago, then New York after graduating. To close the tribute to her friend, Emig states that there is “only one adequate and appropriate memorial to Mina: that we enact her courage; that we fight the current retreat-no, rout-into the elitist irresponsibility of earlier decades, where once again we agree to teach only those who can learn without our active and imaginative efforts”(38).