Blog Post #5 - Bri
After reading Casanave’s article on contrastive/intercultural
rhetoric, I think one of the obvious disadvantages is that Kaplan had a lot of
very interesting theories about language, but not enough concrete evidence to support
his claims. Notably, one thing Kaplan
should have considered is how the writers’ he was analyzing felt about their
own writing. As we saw in the case-study
we read last week, how a person assesses their writing strengths and weaknesses
can give insight to how their own opinions affect how they perform while
writing. Unfortunately, Kaplan
disregarded the human side of writing, and in turn “the writer’s agency [was]
denied” (38). As the article points out,
one advantage to Kaplan’s original research findings is that it simply opened
up the conversation about developmental research and pedagogy in L2 writing. Again, I think Kaplan had some riveting ideas
about how the mind processes language, and these ideas have forced this field
of study to come up with more measurable data, and so in the end the work he
did was beneficial.
I'm not sure if this counts as CR/IR, but one recurring theme I’ve seen with some of my international
students is their unwillingness to explain logos. Some of them think that by simply stating the
fact or statistic automatically means they’ve interacted with the appeal. Knowing this, I have been trying to make it clear
that in order to successfully incite this appeal their analysis has to take the
next step by explaining what that fact or statistic is arguing, and why it matters
to their overall argument.
I like your point about the "human side of writing" here that has been ignored somewhat in contrastive rhetoric; I also thought that Kaplan's work showed some essentializing and miscategorizing (is that a word?) language in building his system, ignoring the individuals in the piece and not accounting for overlapping cultures/subcultures. Your story about some of the students' issues with logos is very interesting--I haven't encountered it yet in my teaching, but it's something to consider in the future to as part of a bigger effort to avoid assuming discussion leads to perfect comprehension.
ReplyDeleteSeconding the appreciation of the idea of the "human side of writing." Don't have much to add, but I also think it's important to consider the writer as an individual inherently unique from every other writer. That said, it makes it harder to make arguments about writers writ large when you focus on individualism, so I do also sympathize with the authors' (Kaplan and others) attempts to generalize, even if they take it too far.
ReplyDelete(Also here to do my full post bc while the actual blog page isn't granting me access)
I think the Casanave chapter is a fantastic example of the sort of "mapping a controversy" unit we do in our rhetoric classrooms, which makes sense given the title of the book. I think she thoroughly problematizes the various perspectives on the CR/IR debates, and I come away with what I think is a solid understanding of the issue. I did find myself wanting more of her own argument throughout, but of course that was not the point of the chapter. I also think "this shit is complicated and none of these people are wholly right or wrong" is a valid argument to make, so there's that. She definitely leaves you thinking by the end of the chapter, and I think concluding with a set of "ongoing questions" was a good strategy for pushing the conversation forward. I also am very curious to read Kaplan now to get a better sense of just what these folks are all responding to because if I found a fault with Casanave's chapter, it's that she frames the debate as being very "Kaplan vs. Everyone Else," in a way that I think somewhat overstates the firmness of that divide. She points out other authors' "acknowledgement" of the importance of Kaplan's work, but I don't think she adequately accounts for its importance herself. There is certainly, at any rate, a lot of overlap between the sides of the debate that seems overlooked in the interest of highlighting controversy.
-Ashlyn