Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Gesa Kirsch, The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective, College English, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2001), pp. 41-62

This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

(1995). Revising for publication: Advice to graduate students and other junior scholars. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 25, No. 1-4, pp. 237-246.

I write in response to James Raymond's I-Dropping and Androgyny: The Authorial I in Scholarly Writing (CCC 44.4, December 1993, 478-83). I appreciate Raymond's reflections on the increased uses of the authorial I in scholarly writing; his observations are particularly noteworthy because, serving as former editor of College English, he not only observed trends in the field but actively shaped them. What interests me here is how Raymond poses the question about the authorial I in terms of appropriateness and then identifies three qualities as typical of its successful use: topical relevance, authoritative voice, and energy of novelty and dissent (479). As Raymond puts it:

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

This book brings together the best current original work on the concept of audience in written communication. Firstly examining historical and theoretical perspectives on audience, the contributors explore and synthesize current theories on its shifting and intangible nature as well as the broader context of post-structuralist concepts of reader, writer and text. The second part of the book embraces a wide variety of research on audience and serves to illuminate contested theoretical points of earlier chapters. Authors of chapters report on case studies, textual analyses, comparative experimental research and protocol analysis.

This study explores audience awareness of writers as they compose for contrasting audiences. Experienced writers—all of them writing instructors at large public universities―composed aloud for two audiences which differed along the dimension of authority: incoming freshmen and a faculty committee. Protocols were analyzed for patterns of writing activities among all writers and for individual writers. Among all writers, two clear patterns emerged. Writers analyzed the faculty audience less frequently than the freshman audience, but they evaluated their text and writing goals more frequently when addressing the faculty. For individual writers, strong “interpretive frameworks” emerged, unique ways in which writersi nterpreted audiences and writing tasks, foregrounding quite different elements of the rhetorical situation. At times, interpretive frameworks overrode differences between the two audiences presented in the writing tasks; that is, writers attributed the same characteristics to both audiences despite the difference in these audiences’ social status within the university structure.