Project Proposal Revision

Katie Berta

Project Proposal: Questioning A Writing Construct

            For this assignment, I intend to examine the idea that writing is about communication and that, therefore, clarity should be the student’s main focus. As I was looking at the readings by Kantz and Porter, I began formulating the idea in response to them. Kantz’s “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively” discusses the way that students often revert to earlier, already-learned forms of writing in order to tackle an intimidating task, which I believe is directly related to the idea that the student believes he or she must, in the service of clarity, simplify complex issues and use reductive reasoning and logical fallacies to make their points in a linear way that, he or she thinks, is easier for the reader. Complication is seen as undesirable and it, along with any nuanced argument, goes out the window. Students who aren’t aware of or who misunderstand the specific discourse community they’re working within will revert to these previous patterns of understanding argument because, as Porter says, “genuine originality is difficult within the confines of a well regulated system” (93). In this paper, I would argue that imposing a restrictive system upon students—and attempting to debunk their “dashing image” of the intellectual hero (94)—is actually in many ways doing students a disservice, preempting the genuine originality that Porter finds desirable because students are left both without knowledge of the private discourse community they are hoping to enter and the empowerment that romantic individualism allows them. Allowing students to experiment and, by virtue of the experimentation, to be unclear, to make mistakes, and to communicate ineffectively as they transition from high school writers to college writers may not be as detrimental as someone like Porter poses it as. Students must become acquainted with the community they’re hoping to enter—while at the same time retaining the empowerment they feel as individuals. My initial research revolved around originality—I hope to support these claims with that research and with counter examples of successful, complicated, unclear narratives that work in unconventional ways but still meet the requirements of their form. Most of the existing research deals with originality by giving instructors formal structures that they may impose upon their students—an attempt to demystify the subject for teacher and student both, dismisses the idea of originality as romantic and nearly unavailable as Porter does, or poses creativity and originality as the most important part of composition. By the end of the paper, I hope to find a niche in reaction to these two approaches—one that acknowledges the value of formal exercises but doesn’t rely on them—and one that allows students some measure of autonomy without dismissing the need for intertextual conversation.