Composing as a Given

Terri and Laurie, you have made me a happy blogger! Thanks for posting--finally, eastcoast-westcoast has some traffic.

Terri, since you know _Cross-talk_, I hope you'll talk with us more about what works and what doesn't about the book. I was intrigued about your story about your presentation. I've taught using the book three times now, and each time I find new resources/new points of view that I did not deploy in past versions of the course, so I contine to find this a good resource.

Laurie, your question about "process" being a given is useful to me, and it's useful to think about what other terms we might substitute for its primacy. "Primacy"--there it is, and Royster and Williams would remind us to question and critique primacy. What does making "process" a given provide (or not)? Is process the given? Maybe it is a given term, but is it a given practice that is theoretically informed? The histories we read the last couple of weeks would dub "freshman English" the given in the conversation. So what would Cross-talk look like if the book began with the histories of composition and rhetoric? We wouldn't be getting modern composition studies, but a more historically focused initial take on composition studies. The other given in the histories is the idea of "current traditional rhetoric," which was assumed to be the main theory of rhetoric and writing guiding composition pedagogies via textbooks and classroom instruction.

I think that beginning with the histories means that we know that process was around before--think of the progressive era with John Dewey as a focus and Fred Newton Scott. What I want to understand is why process was so important. What cultural and social influences urged us to process?

I have more to say about that, but I have to get Autumn to daycare and eat breakfast. Ah, the necessities of material life.

Laurie, I hope you didn't delete the line about putting Cross-talk in there with your cookbooks!