Speculations on Process Knowledge and the Textbook's Static Page
Abstract
A tremendous amount of energy goes into the contracting, developing, marketing, and revising of composition textbooks. And a significant amount of energy goes into criticizing them.2 More than we critics would like to admit, editors-good editors anyway-try to respond to this criticism. Thus we are seeing a new generation of textbooks that incorporate current work in rhetoric, psychoand sociolinguistics, the composing process, and writing across the curriculum. But the surprising thing is that such innovation goes on in the absence of fundamental research into what happens when students read current or traditional textbooks. True, some authors conduct field tests, but, for reasons that I hope will become clear in this essay, field testing provides limited answers to basic questions. We need more basic research than we now have into the interaction of reader and text when the text is one intended to teach a complex process. Without such research, we will never know whether or not our improvements--our attempts to revise and revitalize textbooks-are really contributing to growth in composing. But is such research really necessary, or would it simply be a desirable but ultimately academic exercise? Won't textbooks continue to become more effective as our knowledge about composing increases? Not necessarily, for we have good reason to suspect that knowledge of any complex process-like knowledge about composing-cannot be adequately conveyed via static print. As soon as such knowledge hits the page of a text, its rich possibilities are narrowed and sometimes rigidified. While I certainly don't want to suggest that no student learns from composition textbooks, I do want to raise the possibility that students learn about the process of writing from a textbook less frequently and less effectively than many of us think. To argue the legitimacy of the foregoing assertion, I'll begin with general speculation on the value of textbook discussions of writing and move toward more specific consideration of problem-solving in the act of composing. Though I will state
- Journal
- College Composition and Communication
- Published
- 1983-05-01
- DOI
- 10.2307/357408
- CompPile
- Open Access
- Closed
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Citation context
Cited by in this index (2)
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Miles (1997)Technical Communication Quarterly
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Perdue (1990)Rhetoric Review
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