Excerpted from Teaching Argument in the Composition Course
Editor: Timothy Barnet
Epigraph: "The art of dialectic is not the art of being able to win every argument...Dialectic, as the art of asking questions, proves itself only because the person who knows how to ask questions is able to persist in his questioning...The art of questioning...i.e., the art of thinking...is called 'dialectic,' for it is the art of conducting a real conversation...To conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to be conducted by the object to which the partners in the conversation are directed. It requires that one does not try to out-argue the other person, but that one really considers the weight of the other's position...
--Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method
The hermeneutic idea of reading--a conversation with the text between the reader/interlocutor and the text--"can only begin and be sustained if and when the reader/interlocutor reconstruct and critically engages the 'question' or the argument that the text itself might have been occasioned by or be an answer to" (347).
"This view of reading enables us to imagine a text's argument...as a 'topic' about which interlocutor at generate critical questions that put them in a position to think what it means to know, to understand, and to reflect on difference processes of knowledge formation" (347).
"What follows is an argument on behalf of the theoretical and practical appropriateness of using reading as a means of teaching writing. Throughout this essay, I will be using the phrase the argument of reading to refer to the debate about the presence of reading in the composition classroom. But I will also be using the phrase the argument of reading as a descriptor of the particular understanding of reading and the teaching of reading that I am proposing here" (347).
Salvatori responds to an older composition handbook that argued for abandoning formalized readers because of their "canned" and stiflingly "themed" nature.
"But I wish to argue, to set the two arguments side by side [teaching composition and reading concurrently/ teaching writing sans reading] is to realize what either position unwittingly ended up obscuring and deflecting attention from: that 'the argument of reading in the teaching of composition' is not merely an argument about whether reading should or should not be used in the composition classroom. The argument is about which kind of reading gets to be theorized and practiced. To be more precise, that argument cannot be critically and reflexively engaged apart from the following interconnected questions: (1) Which theories of reading are better suited to teaching reading and writing as interconnected activities? (2) What is the theoretical justification for privileging that interconnectedness? (3) How can one teach that interconnectedness?" (349).
Question #1
"not all theories of reading are suited to uncovering and enacting the interconnectedness of reading and writing" (349).
"In classrooms where these theories of reading are unreflexively performed for students, where reading materials are used as mere pretexts for writing exercises, a student's reading of those materials may become secondary in at least two ways": there's a gap between the value of what's read and what's written; it over simplifies and promotes over simplification reading practices.
teaching reading "makes it possible not only to claim that reading can be taught but also that it can be taught as an opportunity to reflect on, investigate, and intervene in at least some of the processes that produce knowledge that shapes and is shaped by one's understanding of a text" (350).
"Teaching the reading/writing interconnectedness becomes another king of hermetic performance, one that covers over, one that hides rather than reveals, the process of cognition that ought to be the subject of investigation and reflection" (350).
Question #2
"although the processes that constitute our reading and writing are essentially invisible, those processes are, in principle, accessible to analysis, scrutiny, and reflection" (351).
"Part of the challenge confronting us as teachers is to learn how to make is possible--within the time and institutional constraints that bind us--for students to learn to perform this kind of introspective reading. To think about reading and the teaching of reading in these terms--to think of reading, that is, as an analogue for thinking about one's own and others' thinking, about how one's thinking ignites and is ignited by the thoughts of others, justifies the presence of reading in composition classrooms not as a pretext but as a context for writing" (351).
Question #3
"To forefround and to exploit the interconnectedness of reading and writing, I make a point of framing reading and writing activities...that ask students to write their response to a text, to construct a reflective commentary on the moves they made as readers and the possible reasons for them, and to formulate an assessment of the particular writing their reading produced" (352).
"I try to teach readers to become conscious of their mental moves, to see what such moves produce, and to learn to revise or to complicate those moves as they return to them in light of their newly constructed awareness of what those moves did or did not make possible" (353).
Salvatori provides an example of how students highlight certain things in a text and how what they choose to highlight exemplifies what they privilege in a text and how they make meaning from what they read, or did not read.
The "Difficulty Paper"
The students write a one-page response after reading a text about what was particularly difficult in reading the text "not as a means to expose my students' inadequacies but as a reflexive strategy that eventually allows them to recognize that what they perceive as 'difficult' is a feature of the text demanding to be critically engaged rather than ignored...students descriptions of difficulties almost inevitably identify a very crucial feature of the text they are reading and contain in nuce the the interpretive move necessary to handle them" (354).
"To ask those students to account for the steps they took to compose that reading, to ask them to actually mark which places in the text they 'hooked up with' and which they merely skimmed, can serve as a dramatic visualization of how much of a text's argument can be ignored...because of preestablished conclusions or inattentiveness to that argument's construction" (355).
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"What should be noticed about these strategies is that they function simultaneously as heuristic devices (through them I teach my students how to perform certain reflexive moves) and as constant reminder to me that as a teacher I must demonstrate in my reading of my students' comments, questions, interventions, and arguments the responsiveness and the responsibility with which I expect them to engage texts" (355).
"What should also be noticed is that they deliberately go to 'moments of reading' to foreground how those moments determine the writing they produce and that they tend to privilege...places or occasions in a student's text that can serve as points of critical reflection on the connection between reading and writing" (355).
Our own views and experiences of learning to read can be "potentially elitist and exclusionary" (356).
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