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Moves Writers Make
First Edition
by James C. Raymond
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A PREFACE FOR TEACHERS
Rhetoric in Four Dimensions
As director of a large composition program, the first thing I ask about rhetorical readers is "What's new? How is this book different from the rest?" Usually there are few differences. It is a very conservative genre. Now I have to imagine readers asking the same questions as they browse through this book. This is an adventurous textbook, despite its conventional form. It is postmodern in ways that may not be at all obvious at first, since it is free of the stylistic games that postmodern writers like to play. At the same time, it is rooted in rhetorical tradition, but with new understandings of terms that have been either mistranslated or glazed over with familiarity.
The rhetorical theory implicit in this textbook is four-dimensional. The first dimension includes stylistic options: figures, tropes, sentence patterns, tone, detail, and editorial conventions. Moves of this type are gathered in generic categories and captured in a scheme called "The Seven Common Moves"--that is, moves all essays have in common.
The second dimension includes the various framing devices to which information can be attached. These include the classical topoi and the traditional modes, methods of development--"conceptual moves," distinct ways of processing information.
The third dimension is a move that is generally neglected in traditional rhetorics: interpretation, the move that gives any essay its "so-what factor," the element that captures our interest even when we have no practical use for the information an essay contains. Interpretation is arguably one of the two defining characteristics of the essay as a genre--the other being the sense of an individual voice.
The fourth dimension is persuasion, which is the substance of any serious rhetoric. In this book, persuasion is treated not as the imposition of a point of view but as an anatomy of belief and the potential basis of a peaceable remedy for ideological differences.
The First Dimension: The Seven Common Moves
The history of rhetoric abounds in attention to figures and tropes and other stylistic moves that are more or less superficial. Sometimes the lists can become overwhelming, including hundreds of moves with Latin or Greek names that students are unlikely to master, or even find interesting.
And yet, there is something useful about naming the moves writers make, particularly if we want to make those moves ourselves. A skilled writer has lots of tricks and stratagems and tactics. Or to put it colloquially, a skilled writer has lots of good moves, in the sense in that an athlete or a dancer has good moves.
Normally, the moves writers make are invisible. Writers conceal them, following the old adage, "art hides its artifice" (ars est celare artem). Like magicians, they want us to react to the magic without noticing the skill that produces it. To make matters more difficult, good writers, even the best of them, perhaps especially the best of them, may not themselves know what their techniques are. "In truly good writing," Hemingway wrote to his friend Harvey Breit, "no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done." It's not easy to see how it's done because writing is most successful when its artifice is least apparent.
Normally when we read, we are not aware of writerly moves as moves; we simply respond to their effects. Or, to borrow a metaphor from Toni Morrison, texts are like fishbowls: our attention is drawn past the surface so that we see the fish (Playing in the Dark, p. 17). But to learn to write, we have to notice the bowl itself--the normally invisible surface that makes the whole thing possible. We have to become aware of subtle and normally invisible moves so we can make these moves ourselves.
Identifying the artifice--naming the moves--is the rhetorician's solution to this problem. Rhetorical names reveal the techniques and tactics that writers take pains to hide. In writing, as in sports, dance, and music, naming the moves may be unnecessary for those individuals who have a knack for imitating them; but naming them helps those without that knack to isolate what would otherwise be just a blur of expert performance.
There are literally hundreds of good moves writers make--so many, in fact, that any list that attempts to be complete will be tedious and pedagogically overwhelming. Perhaps the most practical innovation of this book is the checklist called "The Seven Common Moves," which reduces the limitless number to seven generic categories:
1. Beginning
2. Ending
3. Detail
4. Organization/Plot
5. Style
6. Voice/Attitude
7. Economy
These moves are explained more fully in chapter 1, and they are reexamined in each subsequent chapter. They are called Common Moves because they are, in fact, common to essays of every type. The Seven Common Moves serve multiple purposes in a writing class:
1. They serve as an iterable system for analyzing an essay whatsoever, replacing the ad hoc questions that are normally attached to individual essays.
2. They serve as a set of lenses that focus on techniques and tactics worth imitating, as opposed to debates about the subject matter of the essay.
3. They serve as a format for journal entries. Class discussion is much livelier and better focused if students have answered questions based on these common moves in advance.
4. They serve as a set of prompts to group workshops on task.
5. They serve as the basis of an analytic grading scale. A numerical value can be attached to each of the moves according to the instructor's priorities.
The Second Dimension: Modes, Methods, and Topes as Conceptual Moves
Everybody knows that traditional modes and methods of development (description, narration, exemplification, definition, and all the rest) are, at least from a theoretical perspective, defunct. Their knell was sounded by Robert Connors in "The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse," College Composition and Communication 32 (December 1981): 444-55. And yet they survive, despite their inadequacies. They survive in part because they provide useful maps of a universe of discourse that would otherwise be undifferentiated and unteachable.
They survive for another reason: the modes and methods are heirs apparent to the "topics" of classical rhetoric. Aristotle's topoi ("topics" in English, close enough to "tropes" to cause confusion) may be defined as "moves the mind makes." It may seem odd to think of a "topic" as a move, since topos literally designates "place," not action. But when we examine the topoi, it becomes apparent that they are all conceptual moves, ways of framing or apprehending information. We can describe a subject, or tell a story about it, or compare it, or define it, or examine its causes or its effects, or in fact use any of the other modes or methods or classical topoi to come to grips with it.
Topics, modes, and methods are conceptual moves that we all learn when we learn language. They occur in any sort of discourse--written, oral, even purely interior, unspoken thought. They are common to all speakers in socioeconomic groups in all languages. They are universal moves; no normal speaker is without them. To appreciate their importance in writing, it may help to consider them in the context of literate versus oral societies. We do not need writing to describe, narrate, define, explain processes, categorize, divide, identify causes and effects, and argue. But without writing, we can do these things only in brief scope. Literacy, as an invention, as an artificial medium, makes possible an indefinite extension of each of these conceptual operations in ways that would be simply impossible in oral discourse.
The extension of these basic conceptual moves in writing is, for better or for worse, the foundation of what was once considered Western culture--though this particular aspect of Western culture no longer has any geographical limits. Without writing, systematic knowledge would be virtually impossible. The extended cause-and-effect analysis that we take for granted in scientific and other academic discourses is possible only in writing. History--extended factual narrative with an analytic and interpretive agenda--is possible only in writing; oral history is valuable, of course, but valuable in an entirely different way. In fact, the organizational framework of every academic discipline and of universities themselves--division and classification--would be impossible without writing. Without writing, our knowledge would be as chaotic as the Web before the advent of search engines (which are themselves cybernetic extensions of division and classification).
When we ask students to narrate or define or classify or argue or exemplify or explain a process in writing, we are not asking them to do anything they haven't done before; we are merely asking them to develop and extend conceptual operations that they have already acquired along with their spoken language. But in writing, these conceptual moves can be concentrated, cultivated, extended, organized, repeated in useful and interesting ways. Extending these moves is a skill that needs to be acquired through study and practice.
But the modes and methods are worse than useless if we expect the wrong things from them. As genres, they are patently artificial. Even when essays happen to resemble a particular mode or method, their authors are likely to have begun with a subject in mind (Grant and Lee, a dying moth, the meaning of "self-respect"), not with a genre, not with an impulse to write comparison and contrast, or exemplification, or definition. Furthermore, as a set of categories, the modes and methods are an embarrassment--like cats, dogs, corkscrews, and tinfoil in the same list--the sort of random collection that we would never tolerate in classification papers written by our students. In practice, they overlap with a dizzying redundancy.
Once we recognize and accept this artificiality and redundancy, however, we can turn them into a pedagogical and strategic advantage. Nothing is ever lost. The skills we teach in any one chapter turn out to be useful in all the others. Description can be attached to a narrative frame, exemplification can be part of a definition, process analysis can be part of an argument--in fact, every mode and method can turn up within each of the others. And if the modes and methods are artificial, well, yes of course; but so are scales and chords and pliŽs at the ballet bar and all the drills and exercises that athletes find effective in preparing for a game. Writing in the modes and methods are exercises for amplifying the power of conceptual muscles that can do only limited work without writing. They are practice for all kinds of writing--personal, vocational, and academic. But even when the modes and methods are mixed and combined within a composition, the result can be an uninteresting and formalistic exercise unless the writer adds what is the soul of any good essay: the act of interpretation that provides a so-what factor.
The Third Dimension: Interpretation, A Higher Literacy, and the So-What Factor
As framing devices, the modes and methods are the rhetorical equivalent of tossing different tennis balls into the air. Interpretation is the equivalent of hitting them across a net. The first move is incomplete without the second. When description is just an inventory of sights and sounds, it is not yet an essay. It becomes an essay only when a writer provides an interpretation of the details that catches the reader by surprise. When narrative is just a record of events, it is not yet an essay. It becomes an essay when a writer interprets the events. Without interpretation, description and narration are just data, organized data, perhaps, but insignificant, unless perhaps a reader is disposed to discover meaning in them.
A process paper is not an essay if it merely reveals a process--how to bake a souffle or trim a reed or assemble a bookshelf or install new software. Useful forms of writing, these--and worth teaching in vocational or technical courses--but they are not essays. A process essay interprets a process, shows us something significant about it that we may not have noticed on our own. This is why Jessica Mitford's "The American Way of Death" (p. 78) is an essay, while a textbook on embalming is, well, just a manual. Interpretation is the difference between a dictionary definition of a word, such as self-respect ("Due respect for oneself, one's character, and one's conduct"), and an essay, such as Joan Didion's tendentious musings about the "true" meaning of that term (p. 178). A definition of essay cannot merely rely on Webster--it cannot merely convey settled information. To write an essay, the writer has to take a stance, have an attitude: "You wanna know what 'self-respect' is, well I'll tell you what it is."
Interpretation also reveals the writer, indirectly, without the confessional revelations that were once thought necessary to persuade students that they had something worth saying within themselves. It reveals the writer by revealing a host of assumptions that guide the writer's choices--assumptions about what counts as good, what counts as evil, what counts as interesting, dull, funny, tasteless, worth knowing about, not worth explaining, and about innumerable other issues implicit in unstated judgments between the lines of every text. To recognize that the writer inhabits the text, either visibly in the form of a first person pronoun or simply by implication, is to return to Montaigne's recognition that the author is in fact the subject of every essay ("Je suis moy-mesmes la matier de mon livre"). It is also a recognition of what physicist and anthropologists have discovered in the twentieth century: that despite the ostensible absence of the author in scientific writing--ubiquitous passive voice and the banishment of the first person--it is simply impossible to separate the observer from the observed. Even if we concede the postmodern position--that the subject-observer is itself a fictional construct--the fictionally constructed subject-observer, the ineluctable mirage of personhood, is always and inevitably discernible in every essay.
Interpretation occurs precisely at that juncture where reading and writing are hard to distinguish from each other. It is the difference between primal literacy--the ability to encode spoken language in visual tokens--and literacy in a deeper sense, the ability to read the world and then to write it. Essayists usually make it seem as if they "find" the meaning in their material, as if it were already there, waiting to be recorded by any intelligent observer. But in fact interpretation involves the imposition of meaning, not the discovery of it. Interpretation is a creative act. A focus on interpretation--a requirement to view the data from a personal perspective--is what makes the essay an act of self-empowerment.
In this book, the Seven Common Moves are always preceded by a question about the "So-What Factor." The so-what factor is not just the thesis. It is not just the writer's interpretation. It is whatever is novel or interesting or surprising about the writer's interpretation. A thesis can be logical but predictable, indisputable (e.g., any statement of personal preference), or laden with unexamined assumptions--and therefore uninteresting. This is the risk we take when we focus on the forms of writing: students may produce the forms, but miss the element of surprise that makes an essay worth reading. The so-what factor, the surprise that makes an essay worth reading, is always the result of a departure from the norm: the writer sees the data in a way most readers would not have seen it on their own. By focusing on the so-what factor, we can teach students that the material in any essay is its subject only in secondary sense; the primary subject, the element that makes it worthy of a reader's attention, is always the writer's interpretation of the material.
The Fourth Dimension: The Epistemology of Persuasion
Style, structure, and interpretation are all elements of rhetoric; but they are, as Aristotle called them, "ancillary" to rhetoric's main purpose, which is the study of the construction of belief.
I do not mean to suggest that Aristotle was a constructionist in the modern sense of that term, but only to exploit a rich ambiguity in a key term in the rhetoric, pistis (pistis). Pistis is generally translated as "persuasion," though in numerous other contexts it is translated as "belief." In recent years classical rhetoric's emphasis on persuasion has been characterized as agonistic and aggressive, a method for imposing beliefs on others, as opposed to a rhetoric of understanding and accommodation. Actually, both sorts of rhetoric are available in Aristotle.
According to Aristotle, there are different kinds of knowledge, each with its own rules, its own degree of certitude, and its own proper application. The ability to recognize these differences is the mark of an educated person. It might also be said, conversely, that a failure to recognize these differences is the root of dogmatism and intolerance, even among otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people. In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes only two kinds of knowledge, rhetorical and mathematical. In the modern university, however, there seem to be at least three.
One is geometry (or symbolic logic, or mathematics in general): absolute precision in a realm of absolute abstraction. There is no arguing with the logic of geometry; it is not just sometimes true, or approximately true. It is always and precisely true--at least for any community of readers that understands and accepts its implicit definitions.
The second is science--factual, reliable, less certain than mathematics because it always depends upon inductive leaps and problematic points of view and instruments that can never be absolutely precise; and it is always susceptible to the possibility that new data will compel us to revise what we thought were immutable laws.
The third kind of knowledge is rhetoric--reasoning that reaches probable conclusions based upon premises that are assumed rather than proven. Rhetoric goes out on an even more tenuous limb than science does. It derives categorical statements from assumptions that can never be proved (or disproved) and data that can never be entirely conclusive. In rhetoric, formal logic is replaced by enthymemes, and systemic data collection is replaced by reliance examples and paradigms that are necessarily inconclusive. The realm of rhetoric is the realm of the plausible and the merely probable.
Aristotle's rhetoric, at least as I read it, is remarkable in its recognition of the limits of logic, its recognition that some questions have no absolute answers and must be settled provisionally on the basis of evidence that is never entirely conclusive. In this fundamentally new/old (i.e., postmodern/Aristotelian) scheme, the analysis and dissemination of belief is the main business of rhetoric. Rhetoric can provide a basis for distinguishing ideological differences that we can live with from those that are truly incompatible. It can provide the epistemological framework not just for persuasion but for critical thinking, for negotiation, and for social and political accommodation. It may be too much to suggest that rhetoric could be a pharmakon for misunderstanding or a realistic alternative to violence. But it can be a system for understanding differences in a way that contributes to the peaceful resolution of conflict.
Sentence Exercises
The sentence exercises toward the back of this book (chapter 12) have been very popular with students and teachers at every level. Unlike many conventional sentence exercises, they are based on the commonsense notion that students need to be taught patterns that they don't already produce when they write. These sentence exercises do not include, for example, relative clauses or compound sentences. Students at every level already write relative clauses and compound sentences, because they speak them.
For this reason, the exercises focus on a series of structures that do not occur with great frequency in ordinary speech, including several varieties of what Francis Christensen used to call "free modifiers"--modifying phrases set off by parenthetical commas. The grammatical nomenclature in these exercises is not at all important; what is important is that students learn to notice, perhaps to "hear," these structures and then to imitate them in sentences of their own.
A Recipe (of Sorts) for Teaching Writing
Each chapter in this book implies a recipe for teaching writing. It's not a sure-fire recipe--writing is not the sort of process that can be reduced to an algorithm. But it is a sensible recipe, one that might be worth trying if you are a new teacher in search of a method, or even an experienced teacher looking for a different way to conduct your classes.
1. After choosing a model essay--an essay that makes the sort of moves you would like your students to acquire--construct an assignment that would have produced it. In other words, construct the assignment that you might have given Annie Dillard or Bruce Catton or Brent Staples if you wanted them to produce their essays that appear in this book.
2. Before showing students the model, give them the assignment and let them struggle with it for a while. This is the purpose of the "Journal Entry" in the headnotes to each essay.
3. After students have spent time working on the assignment, they will be ready to profit from analyzing the model, looking for techniques to imitate, using "So What and the Seven Common Moves" to reveal moves that would otherwise go unnoticed.
4. Have students prepare a draft.
5. Teach students to workshop the draft, providing "So What and the Seven Common Moves" as a checklist to keep their discussion focused.
6. Grade the final draft, using "So What and the Seven Common Moves" as an analytic grading system. If you are committed to process pedagogy, announce that all paper grades are "provisional": students who can provide you with a plan for substantial revision may be allowed to revise.
Because the modes and methods are interpenetrable, the chapters can be arranged on a syllabus in any sequence whatsoever. It may make sense to begin with description and narration, because invention and organization in these modes is relatively easy, so instruction can focus on style and other surface moves; then progress to modes that require more complex strategies for invention and organization, culminating with persuasion.
But a sequence beginning with persuasion is also possible, perhaps even preferable. Students could begin with the system for analyzing belief and persuasion explained in chapter 10 and then proceed through other chapters in almost any sequence, recognizing that each of the other modes and methods is transformed into a persuasive essay whenever the writer's interpretation of the subject is likely to encounter resistance from readers.
If you teach a research paper, sometimes it helps to have students write a personal paper first, drawing on what they have experienced or heard about a given issue, then to write a second paper, supplementing their personal knowledge with research. Two-stage research papers of this sort sometimes help students maintain a personal voice in their writing instead of submerging their own voices in those they have read.
The pedagogical approach implicit in this book is, compared to other rhetorics and readers, relatively simple. I have not attempted to reduce writing to an elaborate series of steps and strategies and cognitive processes, mainly because as a teacher I find myself overwhelmed by texts that attempt too much. After all, textbooks don't teach writing. Teachers do. The magic occurs at that critical moment when we respond to student papers. Textbooks are feeble substitutes for personal discussion and interaction, for making the right suggestion in the right manner at the right time. It's an art we can spend a lifetime learning.
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