Emulation

Why did Donna give us article from 1977? Certainly, it is relevant for thinking about why writing is important. I am imagining a room full of kids who deliberately picked one of the sciency majors because they were told that they were bad writers in high school. Emig hypothesis that writing engages all three of Bruners categories for representing and dealing with actuality might speak to some of the more studious types; while the anecdote about JPS choosing not to write after going blind might spark some sort of discussion; but I am not sure that Donna wanted us to read this piece in order to get us thinking about how to get "non-writers" to care about writing or how writing engages our thinking processes in unique ways.

At the risk looking like an idiot because Donna already mention why she assigned this article in class, I wanted to point out that this article seems like an exploratory paper. It is an exploratory paper that just so happens to be published in 4Cs.

I could be calling this one wrong and if that is the case rebuke me and try to engage the ideas in the text. But even, if I am wrong (or I have just missed the heads up that Donna was going to send us a model to look at), a little bit of rhetorical analysis could be beneficial to my case and to those students who are yet to compose their explorations--quit looking at me.

The first thing that tipped me off was the extremely direct thesis statement. Emig is out to prove that writing is unique way of learning. Emig does not spend a lot of time setting of the context for this inquiry or explaining why it is important, she can figure that stuff out along the way. The voyage of exploration embarks.

It might be helpful to see each part as answering the four questions from last time. Like the second paragraph seems to answer the question, "Who agrees with me?" In talking about some other researchers who agree with her she has established conjecture.

In the third paragraph she moves on to questions of definition in order to find out what other methods of learning that she must contrast with writing in order to claim uniqueness. After she establishes how writing is different from reading, listening, and especially talking, she defines different learning strategies in terms of writing. Considering how writing works for different learning strategies explicitly and implicitly answers certain questions of quality.

What end up with is a essay that poses questions and tries to establish several different positions where the efficacy of writing could be examined more closely. Some of her points are only supported by anecdotes and all of them only scratched at the surface, providing us with a citation or two which we can check out later (or build further experiments off of). It claims it is a "first attempt" to make a case for writing, but I also think it is also an exploration that we may emulate.