Making the Invisible Visible in Writing Classrooms: An Approach to Increasing Textual Awareness using Computer-Aided Rhetorical Analysis

摘要

Writing requires countless composing decisions that are typically beyond the writer's conscious grasp. For students, writing can feel like a process that they have little control over, and a skill that only a certain few possess. Much of the skill in being "text-aware" involves understanding that texts produced from classroom assignments are not just composed of words and sentences, but of highly structured and often highly predictive composing decisions. A fundamental goal of core writing courses in many first-year writing and upper-level technical writing services courses for STEM majors is to impart this textual awareness to students, helping them understand that different decision-making at the compositional level leads to different text types appropriate for specific purposes and audiences. However, 'Visualizing" the decision-making processes of underlying writing, and "seeing" textual patterns within genres, is an extremely abstract idea for students, and even harder to teach within the constraints of a single course. It's a bit like investigating dark matter; one can hypothesize without seeing it that it exists because of radiation signals observed when particles collide, but not really understand what it's composed of or how it holds galaxies in the universe together. Our goal in this project is to provide student writers with a means to jumpstart their understanding of writing as compositional decision-making by equipping them with the means to quickly, and literally, "see" their composing decisions.