1 First-Year Writing at MTSU
On behalf of the English Department at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU), WELCOME to English 1010: Expository Writing! MTSU’s two-semester, first-year writing (FYW) sequence is designed to support your growth as a reader, writer, and communicator. This course textbook is an Open Educational Resource (OER) designed to be accessible to students and faculty and to reduce the overall cost of course materials. This OER was made possible with the generous support of the MTSU Provost’s Office, the Tennessee Board of Regents, and the Tennessee Higher Education Council. It includes specific information about writing at MTSU as well as peer-reviewed articles about the writing process.
MTSU FYW Program Outcomes and Learning Objectives
Program Outcomes and Learning Objectives are the foundation for the first-year writing sequence (see Figure 1) at MTSU. Our first-year writing courses have a rhetorical foundation that draws attention to the questions we should ask when composing as well as the conventions, norms, and expectations of different genres. We approach learning about the writing process this way instead of trying to prepare you for each individual genre you will encounter in your academic and professional life because writing contexts are always changing! The genres you’re writing in today will likely not be the ones most important to your careers, and you may be composing in totally different genres in the near future, but learning about the thinking, situations, processes, habits, and practices associated with effective writing will transfer to your future writing opportunities. The class is specifically designed to support students writing across the curriculum.
Writing in ENGL 1010
The first-year writing sequence at Middle Tennessee State University takes a rhetorical approach to writing. This means that you’ll be asked to consider how “good” writing is situational. There are no hard and fast “rules” for writing. Instead, there are conventions or norms and expectations specific to particular contexts. In ENGL 1010: Expository Writing, you will practice identifying writing conventions across modes and contexts. In particular, you’ll consider your own literacy, practice primary research, key in on different genres or writing situations, and reflect on how to craft effective content for these different opportunities. We hope that by the end of ENGL 1010 you are a confident, flexible writer, ready to take on the challenges of secondary research and information literacy in ENGL 1020: Research and Argumentative Writing. The course is designed to help you be a more effective writer in your selected major, in your future career, and in your personal life.
Writing with a Growth Mindset
Writing with a growth mindset (i.e. seeing challenges as an opportunity for growth instead of failure) is imperative to your success in ENGL 1010. The key is to become flexible and mindful about writing situations and how effective writing changes, depending on the context.
In the broadest sense, learning how to approach writing situations effectively and how to make the most of our writing experiences is the purpose of the MTSU writing course sequence. One of the most important keys for success in ENGL 1010 and ENGL 1020—as well as for your development as a writer outside of the classroom—is to adopt a growth mindset by grappling with areas of difficulty instead of turning away from challenges. English Studies scholar Kelly Gallagher believes that exploring confusion by determining what accounts for it and discerning how to work through it is what leads to learning. Ultimately, what sets successful readers and writers apart is not an innate ability, but rather the willingness to acknowledge confusion and persevere until an understanding is reached. During your writing and research experiences in ENGL 1020, we encourage you to be open to new ideas and to experiment with your writing. You might be surprised to learn how much you can accomplish and how well you can write when you push yourself to work hard and use the resources designed to support your growth.
Considering the English Major or Minor
You may be wondering if an English major or minor is right for you. If you enjoy ENGL 1010 and 1020 and think that you might want more, there are lots of reasons to pursue a major or minor in English, and there are lots of empirical studies that prove that a major in the liberal arts paves the way for success after graduation (Moody). In general, employers are less concerned with specific majors and more interested in an individual’s ability to make independent decisions and communicate effectively. By exploring avenues of inquiry that support their growth as readers, writers, and thinkers, English majors develop their abilities to compete in a market that is, as scholars such as Deborah Brandt remind us, characterized by changing workplace realities.
The English Major Experience
- The major consists of 30 – 36 hours out of the 120 required for graduation. Students have more than 100 courses in the English department from which to choose.
- Upon declaring English as their major, students are matched with a faculty advisor with whom they work closely throughout their tenure as MTSU students.
- English classes are small (15 – 25 seats), so students and teachers get to know each other and can work collaboratively.
- Students have the opportunity to participate in seminars, lectures, internships, study abroad offerings, and online classes.
- Students study more than words on a page. English majors are invited to read and respond to diverse texts, films, images, and audio recordings.
- Peck Hall, the English department home, is in the historic side of campus, and students often carry conversations from the classroom out into the shade of Walnut Grove.
An Open Education Resource (OER) is a free or low-cost text available digitally. Many OERS have copyright licenses that allow remix or revision. They are intended to offer high quality educational content and keep down costs for students.
Section Overview
The chapters in this section invite you to consider composition in rhetorical terms. We take a flexible, rhetorical approach to understanding writing because there are no fixed, universal rules for writing. This doesn't mean that there aren't any rules. Instead, effective writing is contextual, and your relative success as a writer is dependent on your ability to understand how to craft appropriate compositions across situations, whether you're writing in your composition class, in your selected major, in your professional life, or in your personal life. You have likely already learned a lot about composition and rhetoric, although you may not have used some of the language we'll introduce. We invite you to build on your existing knowledge and add tools to your toolbox in the form of new questions you'll ask about writing situations, new understandings of how to organize writing effectively, and new ways of developing and filtering knowledge.
Many of the readings in this book, and certainly in this section include chapters from the book, Bad Ideas About Writing. It is important to note that Bad Ideas About Writing includes titles that can be misleading if you do not read the text itself. The titles for all of the Bad Ideas About Writing essays are actually misleading myths about writing that circulate. It may be confusing, at first, to see these titles. And it is important to keep in mind the content of each essay dispels these popular beliefs about writing that can be found in the titles, by using research from the field. Happily, there are both written and audio versions available for each of these brief, engaging chapters.
The first three chapters in this section address the relationship between rhetoric and first-year writing as well as the purpose of first-year writing in education:
- Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech by Patricia Roberts-Miller (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
- First-Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing by Tyler S. Branson (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
- First-Year Composition Should be Skipped by Paul G. Cook (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
The next three chapters consider the relationship between reading and writing:
- “Developing a Repertoire of Reading Strategies” by Ellen C. Carillo
- Reading and Writing Are Not Connected by Ellen C. Carillo (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
- How to Read Like a Writer by Michael Bunn
To provide a foundation for this work, consider how rhetorical analysis is always at work in communication. Whenever we speak, write, or listen, we're doing rhetorical work. By beginning our considerations of the rhetorical nature of communication with a focus on "Rhetorical Analysis" (below), we invite you to apply these skills throughout your work this semester. The following text, "Rhetorical Analysis," is an excerpt from Try This: Research Methods For Writers, (pp. 79-82) by Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelides.
Rhetorical analysis helps demonstrate the significance of a text by carefully considering the rhetorical situation in which it develops and the ways that it supports its purpose. There are lots of definitions of rhetoric, and the definition that makes the
most sense to you and your understanding of communication will impact how you deploy rhetorical analysis. The following are a few definitions of rhetoric:
- Ancient Greek rhetor Aristotle: “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
- British rhetorician I. A. Richards: “Rhetoric…should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3).
- Contemporary American rhetors Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs: “Rhetoric is a field of study in which people examine how persuasion and communication work, and it is also the art of human interaction, communication, and persuasion” (366).
- Contemporary American genre theorist Charles Bazerman: “The study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities. . . . ultimately a practical study offering people greater control over their symbolic activity” (6).
Try This: Defining Rhetoric (30 minutes)
Find a few alternative definitions of rhetoric on your own, and see which one is most appealing to you. Now, mush them together, paraphrase, and come up with a definition that resonates with your understanding of rhetoric.
Rhetorical analysis helps us understand the various components that make a communicative act/artifact successful or not. A key component to effective rhetorical analysis is careful, active attention to what the author and her text are trying to accomplish. Krista Ratcliffe calls such attention rhetorical listening.
Most people summarize rhetorical listening as an orientation of active openness toward communication, and Ratcliffe identifies multiple components for such a stance:
- “acknowledging the existence” of the other, their self, and discourse;
- listening for "(un)conscious presences, absences, and unknowns”;
- and purposefully “integrating this information into our world views and decision making.” (29)
Rhetorical listening often draws our attention to absences. Jacqueline Jones Royster’s work on literacy practices, particularly of nineteenth century Black women, demonstrates how listening for and being curious about absences often leads us to understudied rhetors. Temptaous McCoy has coined the term amplification rhetorics (AR), a method of seeking out and amplifying rhetorical practices that may not have been effectively heard. She describes AR as a way of examining and celebrating the experiences and community rhetorics of Black and marginalized communities.
Try This: Analyzing Keywords (60 minutes)
Working with something you have recently written, assign keywords (one or two-word phrases) you believe would do well to convey its significance (don’t count, just consider what you think is most important about the text). To do so, follow these steps:
- Identify five to seven keywords based on your sense of the text.
- Then, turn to a keyword generating tool, such as TagCrowd (tagcrowd.com) or the NGram Analyzer (guidetodatamining.com/ngramAnalyzer/). Copy and paste your writing into the platform and initiate the analysis with the aid of the keyword generating tool. Which words or phrases match (as in, you thought they were significant and they show up frequently in your text)? Which words or phrases appear in one list but not the other? What do you think explains the differences in the lists?
- Next, identify two keywords or phrases you believe are not sufficiently represented in either list. What are these keywords or phrases, and how are they significant to the work you are doing? Develop a one-page revision memo that accounts for how you could go about expanding the presence of these underrepresented words or phrases in your writing.
Another way of thinking of rhetorical listening in the context of texts is Peter Elbow’s practice of “The Believing Game,” in which he encourages audience members to suspend potential disbelief or critique of a text. Instead of starting with critique, he works to step into the authors’ shoes and actually believe whatever they are suggesting. Complimentary to this practice is Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s formulation of invitational rhetoric. They offer invitational rhetoric as counter to understandings of rhetoric as primarily about persuasion, like Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric. They see persuasion as ultimately about power, whereas invitational rhetoric instead works to develop equitable relationships. Like rhetorical listening, invitational rhetoric is a method for establishing understanding within relationships. They define such work as “an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and see it as the rhetor does” (5). Although these approaches all differ, what they have in common is using rhetorical awareness to invite understanding rather than arguing for one’s own point of view or “winning” an argument.
Try This: Rhetorical Analysis (60 minutes)
Practice rhetorical analysis. Select an article that interests you, perhaps one that you identified to work with in Chapter 3 or something you came across when you searched for potential corpora at the beginning of this chapter. Spend some time considering why this article is persuasive or appealing to you. The following questions may aid your consideration:
- Who is the audience? What evidence suggests this audience?
- What is the context in which it was written? What evidence suggests this?
- What is its purpose? You might also identify the thesis or orienting principle and consider the larger relationship between the work’s purpose and its stated argument or principle. What evidence leads you to this finding?
- Who is the author? Really—who is the author? Draw on your worknet findings (see Try This for a discussion of worknets) and consider the author’s relationship to this rhetorical situation. What is the exigency, or reason, for writing this work? Or, you might return to considering the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of this article.
There are many ways to practice rhetorical analysis, although it is often reduced to an equation rather than a tool for discovery of a text. Let rhetorical analysis be a method that opens up understanding and possibility rather than one that simply labels certain words or passages. Consider how identifying a particular rhetorical appeal adds depth and nuance to a text and connects you to it in complex ways. For instance, the previous “Try This” offered two approaches to rhetorical analysis. The next “Try This” offers two additional approaches. Consider which one resonates most with you. Which method helps you identify the significance and interest of a text?
Try This: More Rhetorical Analysis (60 minutes)
Working with a text/genre/corpus of your choosing, develop responses to the following prompt. If you seek a text as the basis of your analysis, we recommend Captain Brett Crozier’s letter to shipmates aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak.
In what ways does the author offer specific appeals to the audience? Consider particular instances of the following appeals in the text:
- Kairos, which refers to timeliness—indications of why the text is contemporarily relevant
- Ethos, which generally concerns the relative credibility of an author or argument
- Logos, which means demonstrating specific pieces of evidence that support the text’s purpose
- Pathos, which relates to engaging the emotions
Practice rhetorical listening. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is not here? Are there any notable absences? Things/people/ideas the author does not mention?
- Are there ideas or appeals that potentially challenge your acceptance of the author’s work?
Although we have asked you to identify individual appeals, such rhetorical tools usually work together, and it can be hard to pull them apart. In identifying the various rhetorical components of a text, consider how they collaborate to make a text successful and persuasive . . . or not.
Abstract
"Ethics and Primary Research" is an excerpt from chapter 2 ("Making Research Ethical") of Try This: Research Methods for Writers.
This reading is available below and as a PDF.
Working with Human Subjects
When you conduct primary research with human subjects (which might include texts, images, or places) you need to take into account particular ethical aspects of your research. Imagine if the scientists who discovered the DNA Double Helix had considered how their discovery might impact subsequent generations. What if they had suggested guidelines? Or, what if they hadn’t fought over ownership of the model? How might their interactions with each other have changed ethical approaches to the treatment of DNA data? Nowadays, universities have Institutional Review Boards (IRB) that approve and make recommendations about research with human subjects. If you do not intend to publish your research, your research is not necessarily replicable, or it won’t contribute to generalized knowledge—conversations about research to which particular communities and bodies of research orient, then you do not necessarily need to have your research plan approved by an IRB. When in doubt, you can always ask a faculty member or contact your IRB representative to see if your work is exempt. Even if your research need not be approved by IRB, it is useful to consider their recommendations for ethical research with human subjects because these regulations were developed to protect people. Unfortunately, all of these regulations were developed because researchers have conducted incredibly unethical research. Joseph Breault and other scholars have detailed how our current guidelines have come to be. In brief, many of our guidelines are a version of the 1976 Belmont Report, a report developed by a commission, the purpose of which was to ensure informed consent and ethical treatment of research participants. Informed consent is required when you are conducting research with human subjects. This just means that you ensure that the person you are surveying or interviewing (see Chapter 5 for detailed focus on research methods designed for working with people) fully understands the research in which they’re taking part and that they agree to participate. It is important to let participants know what the research is about; if there will be any benefits, danger, or threat to them; and that they can choose not to participate at any time.
Informed consent and recommendations for ethical treatment of human subjects is a response to inhumane research conducted by Nazis on people during World War II. There have been other problematic, unethical studies— too many to mention here—but one particularly heinous, well-known study is the Tuskegee Study in which African American men infected with syphilis went untreated for forty years so that researchers could examine the impact of the disease. Subsequent regulations ensure that research does not hurt participants and that participants are fully aware of what a study in which they take part fully entails.
This notion of informed consent is central to ethical treatment of research participants. Folks need to fully understand what they are agreeing to when you ask them to participate in your research. There are some populations of people—children, prisoners, mentally disabled persons, and pregnant women—who receive additional protections according to IRB protocols, so you might take this into account if your research includes members of one of these groups. Further, face-to-face research with people can differ from research that you conduct in digital spaces. For instance, if you conduct an informal poll through social media for the purposes of a research project, it may not feel like you’re doing research, but you are! You will need to get consent from your participants, though it might look different than obtaining consent in person.
Interacting with Audiences
The thing is, even if you don’t set out to interview or survey folks, your research still might involve interaction with people, and ultimately, the goal of research is to share your ideas with an audience. If you’re taking photographs as part of your research, as you’ll spend time with in Chapter 7, you’ll have to consider whether or not people will end up in those images. And if so, do they know they’re being photographed? If you’re doing textual research on a blog or a Facebook community, even though the texts you’re considering are public, folks might not think of that space as public. You’ll need to think through how you interact with your potential research participants, data, and audience.
For instance, Kate is currently conducting a project that examines the impact of plagiarism accusations on students and faculty members. All people in her study are asked to consent to participate in the study. However, in talking to research participants about their experiences, she has learned about other students who have plagiarized. What is Kate’s responsibility as a researcher in writing about these people who have plagiarized but who have not consented to participate in her study? As a researcher, she needs to consider the expectations for student privacy, the sensitivity of the material, and the potential harms and/or benefits to the university community. Can she anonymize the students in the stories she has heard, or would sharing any part of these narratives cause the students to suffer? Key aspects to consider when making such decisions are the relationship between the researcher and the research population—or proximity—and potential beneficence* of the research. In this case, Kate is a faculty member, and her research participants are students, so although they all interact in the same sphere, there is a power differential that complicates the relationship. The findings of Kate’s research have significantly beneficial potential for the university, but not at the expense of outing students who have not shared their plagiarism stories publicly.
Try This: Learn About Your Institution’s IRB Office (30 minutes)
Every institution has their own IRB office, complete with their own guidelines and reporting structures. To get a sense of your institution’s ethical approach to research, find your IRB office’s website, and consider the following:
• Who is on your institution’s IRB board? Are they faculty members? Staff members? What disciplines do they represent?
• What is the process on your campus for conducting research with human subjects? • Are there different expectations for undergraduate student, graduate student, faculty member, and staff member researchers?
• How does your institution define research with human subjects? How does it define ethics? You might also identify a nearby institution or a school you considered attending. Find its IRB office website and compare it with the one at your school. Where are the overlaps? What is different? And what is the significance of the comparisons you have made?
Designing Writing That Does Ethical Work
Hopefully you are already on board with the importance of approaching research ethically, with ethics and fairness as your primary research objective rather than objectivity. If you still have questions, or if you’re not sold on these ideas yet, please don’t hesitate to talk to your instructor and colleagues (and us!) about your questions, engage in your own research on ethics, and see the end of this chapter for further reading recommendations. But if you are ready to start designing ethical research, some important written products to develop are research protocols, or your plan for research; scripts, or the particular way you will describe your research to participants, particularly for focus groups in which a group of people participate in the research or there are multiple research facilitators; and participation or consent forms.
Try This Together: Considering Ethical Research (45 minutes)
In groups, consider the following situations, which include complex ethical components from research projects scholars have developed. Talk through the ethical issues at hand: how might you handle them?
- In 2012, scholar Jody Shipka bought six boxes from a yard sale that included personal photographs, diaries, and scrapbooks from a couple she did not know. These boxes inspired her project, “Inhabiting Dorothy,” in which she attempted to travel and record the same paths that the couple had catalogued in their materials. Dr. Shipka invited audience members to also participate in the project, reenacting experiences and images of folks they do not know. What are the ethical components at work here?
- Technical Communication Scholar Fernando Sanchez examined a 2017 court case in response to gerrymandering in two Texas districts. He examined the ways that legislative mapmakers used GIS software to create maps that make political arguments. How might maps and their representations of people represent ethical or unethical research practices? How do images and their representation impact audiences? How might subsequent researchers take up Sanchez’s findings?
- Heidi McKee described how in 2008 she read a research project that accidentally included contact information for one of the research participants who was supposed to be anonymous. The authors had included a screen capture of a newspaper article that described the research participant’s brush with the law. Although the researchers meant to keep the subject’s identity secret, the screen capture was easily enlarged, and the article and identifying information about the person was easily accessed. How does this experience highlight the complexities of maintaining research participant anonymity? How does digital research and publication impact this complexity?
- Photographer Christine Rogers developed a series of images between 2007-2008 titled “New Family” in which she posed for family photos (complete with the quintessential hand on shoulder pose) with people who were strangers to her. In what ways would Ms. Rogers have to approach participants? What are the ethical considerations of such a project?
Below, we’ll focus in particular on developing a participation form, which is necessary for conducting research with human subjects. In Chapter 5, we outline specific research methods for working with people, including surveys, interviews, and case studies, but before you do that work, you’ll need to make sure that participants understand and want to participate in your research. Often in working with human subjects, we are asked to “do no harm” and to weigh the potential benefit to society in relation to the potential discomfort to research participants. We hope that this chapter helps demonstrate why it is so important (and complicated) to consider ethical questions in conducting secondary research and designing primary research, but we invite you to go a step further. In the chapters that follow, you’ll be introduced to multiple research methods and invited to develop invention activities for potential research projects. Instead of merely considering how to avoid harm, consider how your research might actually do good. How can we use these research methods to not just perform ethical research but to in fact be more ethical?
Keywords
ethics, primary research
Author Bios
Jennifer Clary-Lemon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Planting the Anthropocene: Rhetorics of Natureculture, Cross Border Networks in Writing Studies (with Mueller, Williams, and Phelps), and co-editor of Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics (with Grant) and Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers (with Vandenberg and Hum). Her research interests include rhetorics of the environment, theories of affect, writing and location, material rhetorics, critical discourse studies, and research methodologies. Her work has been published in Rhetoric Review, Discourse and Society, The American Review of Canadian Studies, Composition Forum, Oral History Forum d'histoire orale, enculturation, and College Composition and Communication.
Derek N. Mueller is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing and Director of the University Writing Program at Virginia Tech. His teaching and research attends to the interplay among writing, rhetorics, and technologies. Mueller regularly teaches courses in visual rhetorics, writing pedagogy, first-year writing, and digital media. He continues to be motivated professionally and intellectually by questions concerning digital writing platforms, networked writing practices, theories of composing, and discipliniographies or field narratives related to writing studies/rhetoric and composition. Along with Andrea Williams, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, and Jen Clary-Lemon, he is co-author of Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies (Inkshed/Parlor, 2017). His 2018 monograph, Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline (in the WAC Clearinghouse #writing series) argues for thin and distant approaches to discerning disciplinary patterns. His other work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Kairos, Enculturation, Present Tense, Computers and Composition, Composition Forum, and JAC.
Kate Lisbeth Pantelides is Associate Professor of English and Director of General Education English at Middle Tennessee State University. Kate's research examines workplace documents to better understand how to improve written and professional processes, particularly as they relate to equity and inclusion. In the context of teaching, Kate applies this approach to iterative methods of teaching writing to students and teachers, which informs her recent co-authored project, A Theory of Public Higher Education (with Blum, Fernandez, Imad, Korstange, and Laird). Her work has been recognized in The Best of Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals and circulates in venues such as College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, Inside Higher Ed, Journal of Technical and Professional Writing, and Review of Communication.