counterstatement: "Response to Christina Haas and Linda Flower" + "Reply by Christina Haas and Linda Flower""

In their "Response to Christina Haas and Linda Flower," Ruth Ray and Ellen Barton (1989a) respond to Haas and Flower's (1988) "Rhetorical Reading Strategies" by taking issue with their portrayal of basic writers. For Haas and Flower's (1988), basic writers are distinguishable from more experienced writers by the fact that the latter read rhetorically. However, Ray and Barton (1989a) contend that even basic writers rhetorically read; it's just that the sort of rhetorical reading they do isn't valued in academic discourse communities. In order to make this claim, Ray and Barton (1989a) closely read 59 of their own students' texts. That is, Ray and Barton (1989a) ask both graduate (n = 23) and undergraduate (n = 36) students to read the same article in anthropology (Edward T. Hall's "The Anthropology of Manners"). In doing so, Ray and Barton (1989a) give both groups the exact same amount of time (2.5 hours), same instructions, etc. As a result, Ray and Barton (1989a) find that basic writers rhetorically analyze--though Ray and Barton (1989a) never mention the phrase "rhetorical analysis" in the full-length article from which this response is derived ("Changing Perspectives on Summary through Teacher Research")--but the basic writers do so in a very particular style: they summarize as though they are offering advice. Drawing on Bartholomae, Ray and Barton (1989b) suggest that offering advice is the sort of authority that basic writers are used to: "this language reflects the authority of teacher, parent, and text" (p. 170). On the other hand, experienced writers rhetorically read, too, but they do so while making use of the first-person singular pronouns, which is to say, they write from the perspective of an academic community: "...the interpretation of the text seems a matter of common agreement, rather than a writer telling a reader what to think" (p. 171). To quote at length:

The interpretive summaries from both our basic and graduate student writers provide specific evidence that meaning is socially constructed even within the supposedly objective genre of summary: both groups of writers summarize by telling how the text makes them feel and by relating it to what they already know. Basic writers depend on the context of their personal lives and their associations with the general public outside the university, while graduate student writers depend on the context provided by prior texts and their associations with others inside the academic community. Graduate student writers use the same interpretive strategies; it is just that what they feel and what they already know are more conventional ways of feeling and knowing in the academic community. (p. 171)

More specifically, since only about 50% of the basic writers wrote what Ray and Barton (1989b) were initially inclined to call "summary," it should be noted that

At first, we saw these summaries as ideal goals and these students as successful. Now, however, we see these students as making a pragmatic choice to write the exact type of summary we had asked for; they deliberately chose not to include their interpretations and reactions to the original text, adopting our goals for their reading and writing. The students who did not write objective summaries were those who could not or would not subordinate self to teacher or text. (p. 172)

In other words, "Both groups talk about the text in terms of meaning, purpose, audience, and intended effect" (Ray and Barton, 1989a, p. 481), though only some students opt to change the conventions according to which they do.


"Reply by Christina Haas and Linda Flower"

Haas and Flower (1989) reply by clarifying what they mean by "rhetorical reading." For Ray and Barton (1989a), rhetorical reading only hinges on whether students read in terms of "meaning, purpose, audience, and intended effect" (p. 481), but that's not what rhetorical reading is for Haas and Flower (1989). For them, "A purely personal response cannot move a reader beyond a reaction to text; a rhetorical response can allow her to recognize--and ultimately to become a part of--the dynamic action of discourse" (p. 482, not my emphasis). Thus, I take it that, by rhetorical reading, Haas and Flower (1989) require agency in the following sense: "to enact agency, a rhetor must both intend to act as an agent and be recognized as such by the other agents operating in the rhetorical situation" (Walsh et al., 2016, p. 2).