From Emig to Kastely

I was really interested in Janet Emig's article this week. She's been cited many times in one of my textbooks this semester, Writing Across The Curriculum: A Critical Sourcebook. The text provides a survey of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) texts, and Emig's name is in most of them. I can see why. She makes some unique distinctions that set up the whole "Writing to Learn" and "Learning to write (in the disciplines)" movements that are the bread and butter for WAC/WID. For instance, she says, "Writing represents a unique mode of learning--not merely valuable, not merely special, but unique" (122). It's different from verbal language, particularly in that it is "more readily a form and source of learning than talking" (124). So, yes, talking is important. However, for learning, writing is very important too. My guess is that much of Emig's argument seems like a "D'oh" move, but in 1977, this was still fairly new. Somehow, educators didn't realize that writing was so important for learning. Now they do, and most of us in this class were raised in a culture that valued writing to learn--Emig was one of the ones that helped to make this happen! It's a pleasure to actually read her and see part of where this field of WAC came from. (And, as a bonus, she cites James Britton, the British educator who is often credited as being the founder of WAC in Britain).

As for the Kastely article, I can see where he's coming from. I agree that formalism can be too limiting and not really critically engage students as writers and thinkers. And, I agree that inquiry based writing is extremely important. However, I had some trouble reading through the parts on Antigone. I've never read it (yes, go ahead and gasp), and so it was hard to follow what Kastely was saying about the characters and the ways in which they subvert and question standard methods of argumentation. I kept wanting Kastely to talk more about Toulmin's methods of argumentation and the problems that arise from these methods (mostly because I was taught to teach Toulmin style argumentation in my first Composition Theory and Practice Class). I found it interesting that Kastely was presenting an alternative way. Maybe a way into this is to ask:

Can you think of any other texts, not just Antigone, that could have a similar result with our students? What else could we have them read that makes them question argumentation rather than just learn and present it?