• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Janice Lauer Annotated Bibliography Chapters and Essays

This chapter is an anecdotal commentary on Lauer’s introduction to ‘Rhetorica.’ She says after only being familiar with things like literature, grammar, and philosophy, she noticed an inconsistency in her knowledge and ability to teach writing. Lauer says in the second semester of her masters programs she “met Rhetorica face to face” (8). She explains her introduction to rhetoric, which began by seeking out one of her professor’s publications on rhetoric. She says ‘Rhetorica’ was never included in her doctorate course work, but she “made arrangements for private meetings, writing every paper on one of her aspects, gradually becoming more familiar with her” (9). She recounts her interest in rhetorical invention and her first rhetorical discourse community, which led to her dissertation. She also describes her new discourse community and the new space for the flourishing of the study of rhetoric. Lauer concludes her story by explaining the growth and expansion of the study of rhetoric and her excitement to see it.

In “Heuristics and Composition,” Lauer says that theorizers and practitioners of freshmen English must “break out of the ghetto” and investigate beyond the field of English to find solutions for problems involved with composition (80). She argues that some scholars have begun their escape from the ghetto with a “call for the reinstatement of the lost art of invention” (80). Lauer says invention is being found under the heading heuristics, and she stresses that research done on heuristics in psychology “should be invaluable for the teacher who is dealing with the creative process of composition” and for the scholars wishing to create new theories (81). Lauer includes a bibliography of the work done in psychology on heuristics. In her response to Berthoff’s criticism of the study of heuristics, Lauer says “her [Berthoff’s] conception of problem solving as limited to a narrow area of educational psychology-problem solving-learning is not the one held by the majority of psychologists” (98). Lauer stresses that the psychologists she has referenced deal with creativity and concludes her response by rewriting her statement about teachers, using the words “insight into the nature of the creative process of composition” instead of solutions to problems in composition (100).

This chapter is made of dialogues between writing instructors and students. The dialogues illustrate how Lauer’s “responses to student’s writing are multiple, adapting to the changing contexts, shifting needs, and varied tempos of the writer’s progress” (121). Lauer says she is a “co-creator,” “dialoguer,” and “evaluator” when responding to student texts (121). The first dialogue deals with the purpose of the writing assignment, which is to make sense of an experience, to create and share meaning. In the second dialogue, the instructor [Lauer] helps the student decide on a topic or question to answer in his paper. In the next two dialogues the instructor ask probing questions to help students during their planning. The fifth dialogue includes the instructor’s encouragement after reading a draft and a suggestion for the student to “re-create” an incident, which will sharpen the student’s “own meaning” of the incident (124). Lauer says that her interpretive practices demonstrate that she values writing as a process of inquiry. Using the interpretive practices and dialogues she has included, Lauer aims to help students to reach “higher levels of literacy,” “raise and answer questions,” and “go beyond their own knowns and share new understanding” (128).

This chapter begins with a brief description of the increased interest and research in composition studies. Speaking of the new growth of composition studies, Lauer asks herself what drew her and others to research, which was in the past “so professionally unrewarded” (134). She explains that the answer to this question is found in the history of rhetoric and the emergence of English studies, but Lauer intends to focus on “‘metatheroritical’” influences that she says define “what an adequate rhetorical or composition theory ought to include” or “ought to explain” (134). Lauer discusses the advocates for rhetoric study, such as Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, and Kenneth Pike. Lauer describes how semiotics theories “extended composition beyond a preoccupation with exposition to other forms of writing” (134). According Lauer, other scholars explored writing “as a way of learning and discovery,” which led to an interest in invention (135). To conclude her chapter, Lauer says the various scholars since the beginning of the discipline have “stimulated a view of writing as a process of inquiry, as a way of learning, capable of being facilitated by arts of invention” and have paved the way for further multidisciplinary investigation (136).

In her essay, Lauer argues that writing is “an art that can be taught and learned” (53). Lauer outlines ways to start, organize, develop, critique, and rewrite a paper based on rhetoric theory and research. Her application of rhetoric theory is based on tenets, including the idea that writing is a way of learning and a process with identifiable phases. According to Lauer, to help students begin the writing process, they should push students “beyond a sense of discomfort to some understanding of their ‘felt’ dissonance,” helping them to determine their aim in the paper (56). Lauer argues that to help students organize their papers, instructors should “show students the four modes of discourse—description, narration, classification, and evaluation” (60). She believes that to critique each other’s writing students should “comment on the writer’s (1) adherence to focus, (20 development of the aim for the audience, (3) organization and coherence, (4) choices of syntax and diction, and (5) maintenance of conventions—grammar, spelling, and punctuation” (61). Lauer provides an example of how a student would write and revise a paper using these dialogues. Finally, Lauer believes this kind of writing instruction changes the roles of the teacher and student. She says that teachers become guides and enablers, while students become more confident inquirers (64).

In this chapter, Lauer discusses the beginnings of and the nature of the field of rhetoric and composition in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Lauer, many multidisciplinary works in the 1950s and 1960s “questioned prevailing views of the relationship between thought and discourses,” which became very interesting for writing instructors (4). In the 1960s after Lauer and others experienced a lack of preparation for teaching writing, they began to use the multidisciplinary works as starting points for research in composition and began to form alliances, such as the Rhetoric Society of America. Lauer explains that the focus of research on composition instruction of the 1960s centered on things such as invention, audience, and studies of style, grammar, form, and voice. Lauer says that the new “broad areas of inquiry began to generate new pedagogies: process teaching that engaged instructors and students in such inventional acts as initiating writing with issues or questions, exploring using different guides, analyzing audiences, and framing judgments” (9). She says the new process began to show up in textbooks, broken into stages of prewriting, writing, and rewriting. According to Lauer, work in the field in the 1970s turned toward style issues of syntactic fluency. She also describes the beginning of the basic writing movement and the new textbooks that began to include heuristics for invention. In terms of the discipline, Lauer says that “early theoretical discussions of the nature of rhetoric and composition as a scholarly field, the appearance of national conferences and seminars, and the founding of doctoral programs” took place in the 1970s (14). Lauer concludes her chapter by arguing that in these two decades “the space for rhetoric and composition grew exponentially”(16).