A Review of What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices
Charles Bazerman and Paul A. Prior
London: Erlbaum, 2003
ISBN: 0-805-838066 $34.50 pp. 376
Review by Tom Ferstle
Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior's What Writing Does and How It Does It is a valuable collection of essays that overlap in productive ways. I summarize each chapter below and offer general conclusions to the book as a whole as well. The disadvantages to jumping around in the book include missing what Bazerman refers to as "intratextual references," those bits of information that echo and build on what has been written in other parts of the review itself. The text utilizes this characteristic of discourse in order to provide some contiguity throughout the text and its separate chapters. It is a characteristic that strengthens the argument for the use of the book as a complete source in a course curriculum. The "nomad poaching" reading approach, functional and necessary as it may be, can also cause the reader to miss out on the journey of discovery by the author of the review, one of the characteristics of any good narrative as discussed by Philip Eubanks in Chapter 7 (for more on reading as "poaching" see Certeau, 1984). As a writer/student traveler, I am terribly self-conscious that the way in which we write/travel is as important as our destination. Speaking as the conductor, I am pleased to announce that the train is finally leaving the station.
PART 1: ANALYZING TEXTS
University of Texas, Dallas
PART II: ANALYZING TEXTUAL PRACTICES
Conclusion
Let's begin with the end in mind. In the final chapter of What Writing Does and How It Does It, Bazerman has advice for any writer attempting to characterize genres that they may be unfamiliar with or that others may understand differently (325). In the same chapter, Bazerman also defines my task as a reviewer pretty clearly. Bazerman states "Each successful text creates for its readers a social fact" (311). Given this advice as a challenge and measure, I create my text as follows. For the reader with a bottom line mentality, I will simply tell you that a half dozen professors from fields of communications studies, research design, writing across the curriculum, and upper-level undergraduate/graduate composition class, whom I surveyed by email included the book as either the primary text or a course resource in their syllabi using the following criteria in choosing the Bazerman/Prior text.
And there you have it, a social fact, I hope. As a graduate student, I found this text extremely valuable and challenging. From several of the contributors whom I credit further on in this review, I found ideas and examples that I am using in my
dissertation proposal. But for those of you who don't always change the station during public radio's fundraising, then the rest of the review is for you.
Editors and contributors Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior distinguish this new text from other works on discourse analysis because of "its coverage of writing as well as text, its disciplinary grounding in North American Writing Studies, the breadth and diversity of traditions presented, and its focus on introducing methods of analysis" (5). In comparison to previous works of discourse analysis that have confronted textual studies, Bazerman and Prior have focused this work on "questions of how to teach and understand the work of writers" (5). In dividing the work into two parts, the authors draw another distinction between the practices of producing texts and the ways in which writing practices gain their meanings. These distinctions necessarily force a kind of rigid structure on the book that the authors attempt to address.
There are three critical areas or "possible obstacles" (6) that Bazerman and Prior acknowledge readers may experience that are associated with the typical ways that schools/universities and popular culture discuss texts and writing. The first is the definition of text as "any written inscription" (7). By focusing on text exclusively as written inscription, the editors and authors limit their analyses critically. Secondly, although writing is conceived as a complex social process by the editors, the contributors confine their analyses and methods to the literal "tracings" of discourse (see Prior, Chapter 7). Thirdly, Bazerman and Prior would like the reader to attempt to abandon what they call the "natural attitude or stance" (8) of competent readers in which the reader attempts to derive meaning through interpretation and critique. The authors advocate a more sophisticated reading by which a reader might "move beyond questions of what things mean to questions of what they do and how they mean" (8). This subtle distinction underlies the division of the book into its two parts, a distinction that is often difficult for this reader to maintain.
In fact, I found the first part ("what they do") to be much easier to read with the suggested attitude than when I was expected to read Part Two sections of "how they mean" from a "how they mean" perspective. However, the book chapters do a really admirable job of referring back and forth to ideas in chapters just read or signaling those ideas that will be further discussed in chapters ahead. Another nice balancing act is pulled off by the authors'/contributors' concerns for teachers as well as students. As a student and a teacher, I felt that I was the intended reader throughout the book. The division of the chapters' topics into concepts and methods provided a basic understanding of the kind of discourse analysis and the likely texts that might be satisfactorily examined. For example, Prior and Leander's chapter on speaking and writing applied directly to my concerns about using transcript evidence in my own research, while Marcia Buell's cautions about second language student's code-switching directly addresses concerns I have in evaluating my own students whose second language is English.
I tried to bear in mind the cautions listed by Bazerman and Prior while reading each chapter, so that I might judge each by the editors' proscriptions. While that is one way of evaluating the book, I see now that it is only one and a rather narrow rule too. Most of the contributors to this text follow Bazerman and Prior's method for analyzing texts, and by so doing, add to discourse analysis studies. The main problems are really due to the editors' own designs as described above and acknowledged at the beginning of the book.
What follows is a summary and response to each chapter of this text. The editors of the text divide the chapters into two sections, as do I.
Thomas Huckin's Chapter One, "Content Analysis: What Texts Talk About" (13-32) was worth the price of the book to me. As a graduate student, I needed this chapter for its clearly organized characterization of the terms of content analysis, which allowed me to state my own distinctions in my dissertation proposal. Huckin lays out the methodological section of the chapter in simple steps, and the applied analyses section offers short descriptive examples of case studies that use quantitative, qualitative, and combined methods. Finally, the criticisms and virtues of content analysis are simply explained, followed by suggested activities/exercises.
Philip Eubanks' Chapter Two, "Poetics and Narrativity: How Texts Tell Stories" (33-56) introduces current theory and interest in narrative studies from post modern and cognitive science perspectives and weaves those theoretical foundations into a narrative analysis of stories told about Microsoft's Chairman, Bill Gates. The procedure is detailed and interesting to read, as well as a good story should be. Eubanks challenges researchers to explore the study of narrative, metaphor and figures as a way of providing some contiguity to the other directives provided by the "far flung chapters" (53) of the text.
Ellen Barton's Chapter Three, "Linguistic Discourse Analysis: How the Language in Texts Works" (57-82) contains an introduction to linguistics which is a fairly short steep climb to position her argument for rich feature analysis framed by content analysis borrowed from Thomas Huckin's Chapter One. Barton then introduces her own studies as samples that I could relate to and admire. Barton reveals that she wondered why students would sometimes write awkward sentences in their compositions, and that she would "either rewrite the sentence or simply mark it with the correction symbol Awk, neither of which was instrumental either in my understanding the nature of awkward sentences or in my helping the student writer learn to recognize and revise them" (68). As a composition instructor myself, I laughed out loud at this wonderful candor and curious inspiration. Barton then commences to detail this investigation in an informative description of the process of rich feature analysis. Barton defines rich features as "those features that point to the relation between a text and its context (66). In the example above, the feature of awkward sentences is developed as a functional category that contains a domain of kinds of sentences that mismanage multiple clauses or ideas (77). By clearly identifying the categories contained within the vague domain "awkward" Barton is able to suggest pedagogical approaches to identify and correct student writing.
Charles Bazerman's Chapter Four "Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts" (83-96) relies on the limited boundaries of text as written inscriptions only. The author introduces key terms in an attempt to create a "standard shared analytic vocabulary" of what is now a widely recognized phenomenon (86). The domain of intertextuality is restricted to a number of levels, techniques, and what the author calls "reach," that is, the "distance in time, space, culture, or institution" (89) of a borrowing of textual representation. The methods of analysis begins by reminding the researcher to ask themselves why they are engaged in the activity and what answers might be found. It was in this chapter that I first became quite conscious of the inter-textual position of the reviewer, which I was soon to occupy, and the fact that the review itself when published would become a part of the intertextual world of this book and the texts that influenced its writing and the writing that would come after it.
Marcia Buell's Chapter Five "Code-Switching and Second Language Writing: How Multiple Codes Are Combined in a Text" (97-122) uses the term "code-switching in its broadest sense" (100) to include shifts in language use, style, voice, register, as well as the more familiar sense of different languages or dialects. According to Buell, code-switching is of interest to researchers because the phenomenon seems to establish the "relevant contexts" (97) of a rhetorical situation. For sociolinguists, code-switching indexes aspects of social identity, both of writer and perceived audience. Of specific interest to Buell is code-switching as it relates to second language writing. Buell makes clear that the analysis of code-switching is equally relevant to first as well as second language use, such as in the case of academic writing. I readily identified this admonition in regards to my experience in qualifying fields as examples of specific genres of discourse analysis. The details of the procedure of the sample analysis provided by Buell were not as clear to me as those described in the previous chapters, partly because of the apparent necessity to clarify interpretations by cross checking the analysis by separate methods, such as intertextual analysis or ethnographic methods. Still, the example of the African writer, Kwassy, provides a rich description of the problems and the incredible innovations that second language users must perform in all of their writing.
Anne Frances Wysocki's Chapter Six, "The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media" (123-63) seems to be a stretch of the definition of text as stated by Bazerman and Prior in the Introduction, but teachers of written communications studies will appreciate the comprehensive discussion of the different kinds of media that are likely to be included in documents. Wysocki begins with a list of assumptions that underlie the argument that visual elements of media (print or digital) can be analyzed rhetorically using both textual and contextual analysis. The procedure consists of a framework of questions to which answers provide a thick description of the object of analysis, the visual rhetoric of the page or screen. Wysocki examines a number of objects such as a page from a magazine, an interactive multimedia CD, and several pages from different genres of books. This chapter provides a good example of the straining against the bit of traditional definitions of text that pervades most if not all of the discussions in the book. Wysocki's questions extend to the "cultural and economic assumptions and values guiding the designs" of electronic texts thus extending the analysis far beyond the domains of written texts and contexts (158).
The social arena of text production and reception is the theme of the second half of the book. In Chapter Seven, Paul Prior, in a section entitled, "Tracing Process: How Texts Come Into Being" (167-200) keeps students/researchers humble by reminding us that when examining texts in the most insightful ways, "there is, it should be clear, no way to get the whole story of any text" (172). Prior's chapter is especially interesting in the discussion of the undercurrents of authorship in a composition classroom and ways of researching the numerous texts that are produced in varying degrees of collaboration.
Chapter Eight, "Speaking and Writing: How Talk and Text Interact in Situated Practice" (201-37) by Kevin Leander and Paul Prior builds on an earlier chapter's gambit into linguistic analysis by focusing on the ways that talk shapes text, text shapes talk, and the multimodal representations that are the dynamic repositories of text and talk. The section of applied analyses is especially demonstrative of the social construction of writing in classrooms. I found some good tips on coding transcripts in this section as well as some new vocabulary for characterizing my own accounts of another's language use. There are some interesting recommendations and examples for researchers in fields as varied as business communications to new media studies.
Chapter Nine, "Children's Writing: How Textual Forms, Contextual Forces, and Textual Politics Co-Emerge" (239-77) by Kamberelis and de la Luna is an example of wishing for something and then not knowing what to do with it when you get it. That is, I had been critical of the constraint the editors had set out for the definition of texts to include only writing, and for eight chapters I had been wondering how cultural theory or politics might figure into the analysis. The last place I expected to find such an analysis of power and politics in relation to writing was in this chapter on children's writing from pre-school through 5th grade. The authors provide a theoretical background to illuminate a combination of inductive analysis and discourse analysis that complement each other (250). Intertextual, interdiscursive, and intercontextual constructs provide the basic frameworks for making meaning of children's texts (245). In the first example, a kindergartener's science report, Kamberelis and de la Luna provide a detailed reading of the child's text using the rigorous analytical framework to detail how the child has made meaning in her writing practice. There is something so ponderous about the conceptual apparatus brought to bear on the childish scribbles that made me particularly sensitive that there just seemed to be too few alternative possibilities given for the very ambiguous forms that the childish writing took. When the authors admit at one point that "we do not know, for sure, what her intentions were" I was reminded of Prior's admonition about the degree of certainty we may have about the meaning of any text. However, the second example offers many possibilities for research into the influence classroom environments possess to shape identities in its treatment of the interaction of young fifth-grade male students on a science project. There is an extensive listing of additional readings in children's studies and developmental studies of literacies. My appreciation of this chapter grew upon each reading and re-reading.
Chapter Ten, "Rhetorical Analysis: Understanding How Texts Persuade Readers" (279-307) by Jack Selzer contains a very basic description of rhetorical theory followed by the rhetorical perspective to textual and contextual analysis. Selzer makes a close reading of the rhetorical features of an essay by E. B. White, and for a second example reviews the intertextual rhetorical features of Milton Friedman's "An Open Letter to Bill Bennett." Selzer says that "rhetorical analysis is as much a way of not seeing as it is seeing" (302), a piece of advice that seems invaluable in relation to all of the preceding chapters and the many methods of seeing revealed there.
Finally, Chapter Eleven, "Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems: How Texts Organize Activity and People" (309-39) by Charles Bazerman doesn't wrap up the discussion but starts it all over again. This chapter is easy to read and follow, but it was also the most provocative in its practical challenges to any writer or investigator of writing. The description of analytical methods is followed by a necessary precaution to the investigator to limit the scope of any inquiry in several practical steps. There is some terrific advice to any student or researcher examining texts produced in an unfamiliar genre. However, the example of analyses seems to end abruptly with the admission of the author that "the teacher (of the sixth grade class) provided no awareness of the theoretical framework presented in the chapter" (336-37). Bazerman's assertion that the example concretizes in practice the relevance of the method then seems presumptuous, as if the theory is impressed on the example rather than the other way around, even though a close reading of the example would seem to support the main conclusions the author has drawn. Bazerman's choice of the sixth grade classroom's Mayan science project seemed reminiscent of Chapter Nine's children's analyses. The example works because Bazerman demonstrates the social construction of meaning and the dynamic processes of textual and contextual productions; however, it also seems to be an effective demonstration of the role of history on composition practices. The Mayan civilization was once a thriving source of language practice that now exists only as traces in the semiotic practices of new technologies and new people. The intertextual reach of the example seems to highlight the movement away from a culture of print, of written inscription to multimedia forms and fields outside of composition studies.
Conclusion
My own research interests and the current context of increasing attention towards multimedia studies makes it difficult for me to construct the cool, detached, analytical viewpoint in regards to the place of the text within our popular culture as well as the academic inquiry. However, it is interesting to note the similarities between the questions that direct Anne Frances Wysocki's chapter on multimedia and Charles Bazerman's general questions that direct the beginning or veteran researcher in genre analysis. First, there is a naming of elements (visual or textual) and relationships between the elements, followed by a consideration of the contexts and purposes that may be at work within the body of texts or documents under examination. The questions both authors use are a means of establishing a framework of inquiry to narrow the scope of the research, to define what constitutes the "work" of the text. The similarity of the kinds of questions used by Wysocki and Bazerman would seem to indicate that a basic familiarity with the theory and methodology of discourse analysis is critical to understanding the re-mediation of communications in multimedia forms.
What Writing Does and How It Does It provides a satisfactory beginning for advanced students of writing and researchers in any field that uses texts. The book and its individual chapters is a good example of the kind of "bootstrapping operation" that any teacher or researcher might employ in order to assist their students or themselves to move beyond a "naturalized" outlook and revise their understanding of their own work as well as others (321).
Works Cited
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U California P, 1984.