Response to Kaplan and Sullivan readings

This semester I have found myself immersed in discussions of writing pedagogy as a result of my job tutoring in the Writing Center; these readings provide useful insights into the role of composition educators in a technological landscape which is repositioning writers in the publishing process.


One issue addressed by Kaplan which resonates with my experiences in the Writing Center is that of the “proliferation of freshman English as the most inevitable part of a college education.” I would say that 70% of our clientele come to us for help in one of these intro-to-composition courses; this is because, as Molly Wingate suggests in her essay “What Line?”, freshman English serves as a “gatekeeper” to American academics. This term brings the importance of writing teachers into focus; Paulo Firere is quoted stating “It is impossible to think of education as an autonomous or neutral practice.” We (as teachers of writing) must, therefore, be aware of how the hegemonic negotiations occurring in emerging communication technologies will be conveyed through our instruction. Since writing can no longer concern itself only with print media, we must address the ideological connotations of digital media like blogs, hypertexts, and even tweets. In this way I see “rhetoric” as a powerful pedagogical tool for bridging the gap, so to speak, between the methods we use and our goals as writers.

Although the Sullivan article reads as very dated, she presents some relevant points. In particular, she suggests that accepting the computer as a tool for writing means embracing the rhetoric of the “page.” I have witnessed this pedagogical strategy being applied in ENGL 103 here at Clemson—the first project students were assigned was a “Visual Rhetoric Analysis” in which they had to choose an image (usually an advertisement or political cartoon with some overt motivation) and use language to describe how that image was being used. This necessitated that the students incorporate multimodal layouts for their papers, and the emphasis placed on examining the visual design of images lent further awareness to the students’ own design choices. I worked with many students over the course of this assignment; they frequently brought in saved drafts on their laptops (which brings to mind Sullivan’s distinction between paper-drafts and digital ones as an important facet of the role computers play in the writing process) and desired feedback on not only their prose, but also on their layout/formatting decisions. My job became more than what is implied by “writing tutor”; I would show them how to wrap text around images, format their paragraphs, arrange captions and annotations, and finally how to deliver these carefully developed pages to their instructor with methods ranging from print (discussing the benefits/drawbacks of double-sided pages) to publishing on class blogs or uploading Google dox.

In conclusion, there is no doubt in my mind that Sullivan’s prescribed “new pedagogy of writing” has begun to emerge in the two decades since she wrote her article. As Kaplan suggests, the “computer revolution” is above all else a “writing revolution,” and this is clearly reflected in the writing classroom of the 2010s (or whatever we call where we are now).