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Wearing Many Hats: Reflecting on Reading and Writing Procedures as a Student and as a

Teacher

I. Introduction: An Exercise in Reflection

As a tutor and teacher of English composition and literature, I emphasize to my students

the paramount importance of diligently reflecting on their reading and writing processes as a

necessary step to growing as a writer. All too often instructors are confronted with the harsh

reality that they must walk the walk if they are to talk the talk, and so in this assessment I am

attempting to ‘overcome my expertise’ and critically examine those reading and writing

processes which have become second nature to me. In this analysis of my own procedures, I

hope to explicate some of the essential aspects of reading, invention, and revision that have

contributed to my identity as a writer, and then apply these insights directly to my pedagogical

practices.

From this exercise, the most readily apparent--and consequential--hypothesis I might put

forth about revision is that students can only see and experience the significant distinction

between editing and revision by literally ‘re-seeing’ their writing. This notion of revision as ‘re-

seeing’ a piece of writing has been put forth by many composition scholars including Emily

Meyer, Joseph Harris, and Barbara Tomlinson, but I had, until now, never fully grasped the

powerful implications of the metaphor, dismissing it as an admirable yet lofty goal consisting

ultimately of hollow language. While I have made several useful observations about my reading,

writing, and revising processes, the most significant insight was, oddly enough, a result of the

structure of the assignment. In order to write this statement on revision--this conceptualization

which I am now articulating on paper in its first rough and hasty forms--I first undertook the task

of 1) reading an op-ed online news piece, 2) writing an initial draft of a rhetorical analysis of the

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piece, 3) undergoing a peer conference of the draft, and 4) revising a second draft of the analysis.

I attempted to carry out the steps of the assignment as described by the instructor as faithfully as

possible, and I believe that this attempt--not to write with the entire gamut of tried and true

procedures I generally follow, but to trust in the underlying logic of the assignment--was the

primary cause, whether contingent or intended, of my resulting insights about the successes of

revision as ‘re-seeing.’

Allow me, before proceeding with an extended analysis of my reading and writing

processes, provide a brief summary of the news article that was the primary source for my

rhetorical analysis. I selected the article, “Stripping a Professor of Tenure Over a Blog Post,” by

Conor Friedersdorf, published online in The Atlantic on February 10, 2015. Incidentally, I

stumbled upon this piece on a social media feed where I subscribe to updates from The Atlantic,

and the title immediately piqued my interest. The following is a lengthy excerpt from the second

[revised] draft of my rhetorical analysis, which will both acquaint my reader with the content

covered in the article as well as tie into my later discussion of the revision process:

In late October 2014, a graduate student in philosophy, Cheryl Abbate, was instructing an

undergraduate class in an Ethics course at Marquette University, a Catholic university in

Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After class, one of Abbate’s students [who remained nameless in

all published accounts of the matter] approached the instructor and took issue with her

use of gay marriage as an example of something that Rawls’ Equal Liberty Principle

would allow. The student claimed to be an opponent of gay marriage, and chastised

Abbate for allegedly setting a dangerous “precedent” in the classroom in which students

were discouraged from expressing any opinions counter to those of the instructor. After a

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lengthy exchange in which the undergraduate student and Abbate discussed their

differences of opinion and Abbate remarked, “You can have whatever opinions you want

but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments, and

sexist comments will not be tolerated. If you don’t like that you are more than free to

drop this class,” the student revealed that he/she had been covertly recording their

conversation and intended to show it to Abbate’s superiors. McAdams, the professor

under fire by Marquette, published an excerpt of the conversation on his blog, revealing

Abbate’s full name, and criticized her encounter with the student on the basis that it

exemplified a “tactic typical among liberals now” used to silence opposing political

views. After Abbate received extensive hate mail and threats of violence, Dean Richard

Holtz informed McAdams in writing that his tenure was revoked as a result of his

“unilateral, dishonorable and irresponsible decision to publish information that was false

and materially misleading.” Conor Friedersdorf’s article, “Stripping a Professor of

Tenure Over a Blog Post,” is just one example of the many opinionated accounts of the

affair. (Draft #2)

It is apparent from this summary that the issues dealt with in Friedersdorf’s piece are complex

and multi-faceted, which contributed to the difficulty I experienced in reconciling the writer’s

project with my own opinions. Nevertheless, this article provided fertile ground for critical

reflection on my reading processes.

II. Reading Procedures: Undermining Illusions of Competence

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The process I engaged while reading this piece was fairly typical of the way I go about

reading scholarly nonfiction items. I generally annotate extensively, and this assignment was no

exception--ample marginalia fills the margins as well as limited underlining of the text (Figure

1). While it may seem trivial to devote such a generous portion of this assessment to the role of

underlining, I believe it is crucial to touch upon its significance as a strategy that can help--or

hinder--readers. Common sense dictates that excessive underlining or highlighting is effectively

useless as a strategy for comprehension and review; if nearly every word (or the vast majority, at

least) is underlined, its use as a visual cue to draw the reader’s attention back to the most

important words, phrases, and ideas is null. Excessive underlining or highlighting is not,

however, merely a harmless waste of time nor a means of transforming assignments into

artwork; it can actually hinder recall by acting as an illusion of competence. The appearance of

this medley of indistinguishable marks on the page contributes to the illusion that the material

was meaningfully dealt with, comprehended, memorized; in other words, it provides the illusion

that the material is already in one’s brain and that the reader is ‘competent’ in the content.

Even the best readers are subject to such illusions of competence, including myself. For

this reason, I strove to keep my underlining minimal, and mark only the instances in which the

particular language choices by the author or the speakers of dialogue were instrumental to my

understanding and analysis of the article. Such instances I can observe in the first paragraph of

the nine-page article include, “what protection does it offer?” and “shabby treatment of the

graduate instructor he was criticizing.” If my underlining habits in this brief paragraph are

representative of my treatment of the entire article, I would contend that they are aligned with

my aforementioned intentions; “what protection does it offer?” is representative of one major

component of Friedersdorf’s project, which is to problematize the concept of tenure, and “shabby

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treatment of the graduate instructor he was criticizing” suggests the reason that McAdams’

tenure was revoked.

As previously mentioned, my reading produced extensive marginalia (see Figure 1

below). Taking a cue from Mary Goldschmidt’s article, “Marginalia,” I thought it would be

useful to loosely classify my various annotations based on function. The categories I utilized for

this assignment [which were not the categories put forth by Goldschmidt] are, in order of

frequency: “reactions,” “summary,” “questions,” and “glosses.” Those annotations classified as

“reactions” include my (dis)agreement with, extensions of, or presumed implications of the text;

those classified as “summary” include summations and paraphrases of the text; those classified

as “questions” include instances in which I was confused by the text or missing a piece of factual

information, as well as rhetorical questions I posed in response to the text; finally, those

classified as “glosses” refer to the style of annotation extolled by Ann Berthoff and Donald

Murray that serve to articulate the content, structure, and overall function of a chunk of text.

Figure 1. A sample of my marginalia on a dialogue excerpted in Friedersdorf's article

I attempted to quantify the number of annotations belonging to each of the self-

designated, aforementioned categories as a means of gaining additional insight into my reading

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processes. It is worth noting that my annotations consisted primarily of reactions (~39.68%) and

summary (~31.75%), a lesser quantity of questions (~19.01%), and very little glossing (~9.5%).

While this quantitative data is certainly imperfect, as some annotations overlap multiple

categories and I am the only individual classifying them [i.e., I didn’t ask a sample of people to

classify the annotations according to my categories and then take the arithmetic mean of their

results, in other words], it is still revealing of the ways in which the reading material and the

assignment influenced my reading processes.

I hypothesize that the number of reactions I recorded—indications of my (dis)agreement

with the text, logical extensions of the text, or presumed implications of the text—was greater

than the number of summaries [though not significantly] because the text was relatively

straightforward in the sense that it did not require significant theoretical knowledge or discipline-

specific scaffolding to comprehend. Conversely, I would hypothesize that the annotations I

record on the average scholarly nonfiction work would contain the highest percentage of

summaries as a result of my active effort to assimilate the content into both my working and

long-term memories—physically transcribing summaries and paraphrases of the content

contributes to this task. I would also venture to guess that my annotations on such a work would

contain a higher percentage of glosses, as I generally find that this sort of macrocosmic view of

the structure of the text is instrumental to understanding the development of the author’s project.

On Friedersdorf’s piece, my glosses were labeled “author’s argument,” (x3) “author’s question

and possible hypothesis,” and “what the author is specifically interested in and how he plans to

follow up.” So, it appears that my use of glosses in this activity was devoted exclusively to

tracking the development of the author’s viewpoint. While I would likely have used glosses to

denote the various excerpts [of McAdams’ blog post, the dialogue between Abbate and the

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undergraduate, and Dean Holtz’s letter to McAdams], Friedersdorf indented all excerpts so that

they were already clearly visually demarcated, and to gloss these sections would have proved

superfluous.

This review of my reading processes tended generally to reinforce my hypotheses

regarding the strengths of rhetorical reading strategies, namely that the attempt to construct

rhetorical context as a means of understanding is a distinctive feature of advanced readers, as

expressed by Linda Flower and Christina Haas in “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the

Construction of Meaning.” Specifically, this insight holds particularly true as I engage in an

ongoing attempt to make meaning of Friedersdorf’s argument and flesh out my own position on

the McAdams affair. Although it was not part of the assignment, I feel obligated to mention that

I have done some follow-up research in an attempt to illuminate what I suspected to be some

expertly-hidden intentions on Friedersdorf’s part, which I wrote about in the second draft of my

rhetorical analysis; in other words, I suspected Friedersdorf’s apparently cool and distanced

reportage to contain more intention to further his own project than might be first distinguishable.

After reading several follow-up accounts of the issue by Cheryl Abbate and additional excerpts

of John McAdams’ blog, I believe my suspicion to be confirmed—but not only has this

additional reading confirmed my hypotheses about what information Friedersdorf selectively

included and excluded, it has also recursively strengthened my belief in the strength of rhetorical

reading strategies and social constructionist theoretical frameworks.

III. Writing Procedures: Invention, Revision, and ‘Re-Seeing’

When undertaking my first draft of the rhetorical analysis assignment, my response was

largely a result of the way the assignment was written, as well as what I saw the relative stakes of

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the assignment to be. Rather than attempt a comprehensive, highly organized and hierarchical

rhetorical analysis of the piece as a whole, I responded to each of the questions posed by the

assignment individually. In this sense, my resulting draft was highly influenced by the structure

and language of the assignment. The assignment questions that I addressed, in their given order,

include: “Analyze this writer or writers’ project(s) and your response to the reading as a

particular member of the writer’s audience,” “What is this writer’s project?” “Why did you

respond as you did?” and “How did writer, audience, and subject shape what you want to say

about the reading?” My resulting draft encompassed three paragraphs and did not attempt to

construct any overt connection between the questions, although I feel that it was relatively well

organized by virtue of the connectivity of the prompt questions.

This writing task differed greatly from many of those I encounter as a graduate student, in

which I am free to address a mind-numbingly broad array of topics, literary works, and fields

with virtually no limitations—the resulting paper often need only be tangentially related to some

book or theory touched upon in class. While this allows me exceptional freedom in constructing

my own writing tasks, it is far more difficult to write one’s own research question—to determine

what is at stake—than it is to simply address a clear and concise question laid out for me. In that

sense, this writing exercise was extremely refreshing, as the element of freedom came in

choosing the piece about which to write rather than in constructing my own writing task. The

aforementioned questions were generative by nature, and therefore not only reduced but also

eliminated the need for me to engage in invention strategies such as brainstorming, mind-

mapping, and outlining. My introductory sentence is indicative of the direct, chronological

nature in which I addressed the prompt, the first question of which asked about the writer’s

project: “In ‘Stripping a Professor of Tenure Over a Blog Post,’ author Conor Friedersdorf’s

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primary project is to make his audience consider what the limits on academic freedom should be,

and how the university tenure system should ensure professors the right to academic freedom.”

During my peer review conference, I became suddenly self-conscious of this mechanical

aspect of my writing. I was suddenly aware, upon reading my peer’s draft, that I did not directly

quote the source text itself even once. I had felt, in my initial drafting, that referring to direct

quotations would be allowing the text to speak for itself—decidedly not the task of this

assignment—and would further remove me from the task of formulating a response to the issue

by allowing me to skirt the responsibility of deciding when, where, and how to paraphrase. I

stand by this decision on these ground; on the other hand, I realized that, perhaps because my

rhetorical analysis was not required to have a formal introduction, thesis, or conclusion, I had

been not been writing for an audience at all. I did not even summarize the article; I wrote, rather,

as if I were composing an extended entry in an annotated bibliography for my own future

reference. The most significant suggestion that my peer offered was to include a summary of the

source text—a suggestion that I took in the revision, and which is reproduced in the introductory

section of this analysis.

When undertaking the second draft of the rhetorical analysis, I made a crucial and

insightful move that I have never, until now, felt to be justified: I started from scratch. While I

am well-acquainted with the notion forwarded by many compositionists that teaching students

revision as a way of ‘re-seeing’ the writing task will ameliorate the misconception that revising

consists primarily of making local, sentence-level edits, I had heretofore failed to see the true

value of the metaphor, or how to teach students how to ‘re-see.’ Although I am far from

answering that instrumental question of how to teach revision, my decision to start ‘from scratch’

produced a second draft that never could have emerged from a mere reworking of the first. In

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beginning my second draft, I disregarded the assignment sheet to which I so loyally clung during

the first draft, and instead zeroed in on what I felt to be the subtle syntactical clues informing

Friedersdorf’s project:

The first sentence of Conor Friedersdorf’s piece, entitled “Stripping a Professor of

Tenure Over a Blog Post,” published online in The Atlantic on February 10, 2015, reads:

“Professor John McAdams is being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for

writing a blog post that administrators characterize as inaccurate and irresponsible.” This

opening sentence […] appears at first glance to describe the issue in a cool, distanced

tone, suggesting that the author is writing as impartially as possible and perhaps will

simply report on--rather than respond to--the issue at hand. Two features of this sentence

and the rhetorical context in which it appears, however, indicate to me otherwise upon a

third reading. First, the phrase “a blog post that administrators characterize as

inaccurate…” suggests that Friedersdorf does not agree with the administrators’

characterization of the post, or that he is somehow aligned against their position; if

Friedersdorf had also judged McAdams’ blog post as inaccurate and irresponsible, I

suspect that he would instead have phrased this sentence: “Professor John McAdams is

being stripped of tenure by Marquette University for writing an inaccurate and

irresponsible blog post.” The phrasing that Friedersdorf did utilize seems to me to subtly

foreshadow his disagreement with the actions taken by Marquette University

administrators, as it emphasizes the subject(s) who deemed the blog post to be inaccurate,

rather than emphasizing the inaccurate nature of the post itself. […] The second feature

[…] was the fact that it was published in The Atlantic, which primarily features lengthy

op-ed style pieces and seems relatively unconcerned with merely presenting “news.”

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This shortened first paragraph of the second draft accomplishes everything that the

corresponding portion of the first draft did, and then some. I do not simply state what I see the

author’s project to be, but rather refer to his own syntax and word choice to demonstrate both

what I see his project to be, and why I am suspicious of it. The first section of the second draft is

exemplary of the way in which ‘re-seeing’ the writing task—and refraining from the temptation

to merely add to and subtract from the original work—allowed me to produce a piece that I do

not believe would have been otherwise possible.

IV. Conclusion

The most valuable insights from this reflective practice have resulted from a concerted

effort to make my writing processes visible to myself and to others; while the effort to make my

reading processes visible has also proven useful, it has served to reaffirm my theoretical beliefs

about reading practices and meaning-making rather than challenge them. I perhaps found the

notion of ‘re-seeing’ my assignment so valuable in part because I find myself to be particularly

affected by the phenomena of Einstellung, in which an original idea or phrase prevents me from

accessing an improved idea or phrase, or in other words, ‘why good ideas block better ones.’

Although beginning a second draft independent from the first did not cancel out the ideas that I

had first had about the article and its rhetorical context, it did free me from the particular

language choices and organizational structure of the first draft, allowing new ideas to be

articulated more readily. While ‘starting from scratch’ is clearly not always an option for many

writing tasks, this reflective exercise has provided me the insight for new and [hopefully]

improved compositional practices.