Taylor, S. S. (2011). "I really don't know what he meant by that": How well do engineering students understand teachers' comments on their writing? Technical Communication Quarterly, 20(2), 139-166. doi:10.1080/10572252.2011.548762

12:59, In this study, Smith tries to ascertain written comments' helpfulness in the field of engineering by analyzing comments from both engineering and English faculty. The study is mixed methods because she has to interview both the engineering and English faculty in order to see what they meant by particular comments, but then she interviews students too in order to see what they thought. So I say mixed methods because Smith has to analyze a corpus of comments quantitively, then cross reference the numbers with students and teachers intentions and understandings. 

She compared a lot of her results to an earlier study she had done: 

Smith , S. ( 2003a ). The role of technical expertise in engineering and writing teachers' evaluations of students' writing . Written Communication , 20 , 37 – 80 . [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]

What did she find? 

Focus

Reason

Mode

Development 

Content/form 

Mechanics 

This study identified two components of students' understanding of comments: recognition of the focus of the comment and comprehension of the reason for the comment.

Students incorrectly guessed a focus 18% of the time

 Unfortunately, the students were unable to venture any guess about the focus of 8% of the comments, and in fact, this “I have no idea” response was the most common response if the student did not recognize the focus correctly.

The comments least likely to be recognized were coherence (40%), validity (45%), and effort (0%, but the sample included only two such comments). These were three of the four least common focuses, so students were less accustomed to seeing and recognizing them. 

Coherence comments tended to be confused with development of ideas; 83% of the unrecognized coherence comments were interpreted as development. This finding suggests that students had difficulty recognizing the difference between level of detail (development) and relevance or internal consistency of details (coherence). 

This tendency of students not to recognize validity comments suggests that teachers should more clearly highlight the topic of validity comments as the truth of the information and perhaps elaborate more fully on the concept that the student needs to learn. Comments that included phrases such as “can't be right” or “not so!” were recognized by students as validity comments, giving the students a better opportunity to identify mistakes and learn from them.

Only 55% (388) of the 708 comments in the study were well understood, with both focus and reason recognized. (See Table 4, which shows the extent of understanding of the reason behind comments in each focus category.) If we include comments for which the student partially understood the reason, the percentage increases to only 68% (481) of the 708 comments in the sample. 

 Illegible handwriting was a pervasive problem in this sudy, as was also the case in Taylor's research of student mis-readings of faculty comments (2011). Over and over, students confessed that they could not read some of the faculty comments. Other "fixable" problems were failure to respond in a timely manner, failure to prioritize comments, failure to qualify comments (and consequently overgeneralizing context-specific advice), and, most importantly, failure to have a long-term view of revision. All of these can be addressed to some degree in faculty development workshops and in brown bag lunches.

For example, Mary Hayes and Donald Daiker (1984) determined that students frequently misinterpreted and even ignored the feedback they received. More recently, Williams (1997), whose research is described above, found that 25% of written comments were not understood as teachers intended, and in Taylor’s 2011 study, only 55% of 708 comments were well understood. These studies all focus their analysis on how students interpret each comment individually. 

Yet, this study focuses on perceptions, rather than on the comments

themselves, so it tells us more about how students process comments than

about the content of the comments. Simply assigning a writing task may shift

students’ attention away from comprehending material and toward the style

or clarity of their own writing. The idea that there may be confusion is suggested by Taylor’s 2011 study of how engineering students understood written

comments on their papers. In separate interviews, she asked teachers and their

students to explain what comments meant. These interviews indicate that

students may focus more on issues of expression in their writing rather than

logic or accuracy, even when they receive comments that teachers explained

in interviews were pointing to misunderstandings of material. For example,

a comment one teacher had written about something that was “completely

inconsistent with the rest of the paper” was described by the student as saying “we should have elaborated and explained more” (149). Another student

responded to a comment by saying “I think that is just a difference in the way

we’re writing”; however, the teacher explained that “[it is] a correction because

they said the computer was used to set the steam pressures. You’re not actually

setting the steam pressure” (149). Furthermore, when asked to explain comments that targeted the validity of information, students declined even to guess

18% of the time. 

so this is the one where students are not perceiving that teachers are calling the logic sequence of their ideas coherent, rather, the students are thinking that they're talking about their writing 

lit review 

Such research on student reception of response is less common than are studies of the comments themselves.

Regarding preferences, Straub (1997) found that students prefer comments that state the reason for an evaluation and that tie the reason to the student's ideas or words, thus confirming an established best practice. 

Similarly, Patchan, Charney, and Schunn (2009) found that students' comments on peers' papers tended to offer more praise and directive solutions than did faculty comments, and Patchan, Charney, and Schunn speculate that the student practices reflect their preferences. Kind of like the advice thing for basic writers, 

the disciplinary element of context has received little attention.

context has a strong effect on both the writing and the reading of comments

misc. 

But teachers in engineering aren’t going to grade with a contract, so validity comments matter/…

But that’s not you. You’re not asking whether it leads them to revise, you’re asking how it changes the quality of their writing, but would that have any implications for revision? 

Revision studies, 

Studies that measure the extent to which comments lead students to revise or to achieve improved learning outcomes have attempted to address such concerns by examining the effectiveness of comments as teaching tools. 

genre, script: it's interesting to think about how students need a script for interpreting comments, that is, the comments they don't recognize are the ones they aren't used to seeing

&&&

x

The genre of the end comment: Conventions in teacher responses to student writing

Smith, Summer.College Composition and Communication; Urbana Vol. 48, Iss. 2,  (May 1997): 249.

In this article, Smith studies the genre of the end comment, obviously, but she does so using two different samples: one from Penn State, and another collected earlier from Connors and Lunsford in 1993. 

She relies heavily on Bakhtin in order to form her questions and interpret her results, specifically Bakhtin in his distinction between primary and secondary speech genres. Importantly, Bakhtin observes that secondary speech genres like the novel digest primary genres, and change them while they do so. Or as Smith says, "The use of the imperative to suggest or make an offer is unusual in everyday conversation and most written genres. The high incidence of the command in the coaching genres supports Bakhtin's assertion that primary genres change when they are absorbed by secondary genres (62)" (n. pg.). 

She broke her results down into three different categories: (1) judging genres, (2) reader response genres and (3) coaching. 

Smith also made some suggestions: "To minimize the intimidation and thus make the suggestions and offers more inviting to students, teachers should consider two techniques. First, provide specific guidance in suggestions, rather than simply restating an evaluation in question or command form. Second, rather than commanding students to accept offers of assistance, use a structure such as "If you stop by my office, we can practice with some examples to improve your sentence variety," which emphasizes the benefits of choosing to visit the teacher" (Smith, 1997, n. pg.). 

While I read this, I wondered how the move to contract grading would affect results like these. 

Other judging genres, such as evaluation of correctness and justification of the grade, are selected from the repertoire primarily to convey negative messages. Naturally, teachers rarely mention correctness unless they perceive a problem. Justifications of the grade, which explicitly mention the reason for the letter grade assigned to the paper, are usually an attempt to forestall authority challenges, which occur most often when a student receives a low grade. For example, one teacher wrote "Though an interesting read, this paper does not fulfill the assignment and must receive a failing grade."

Third, 54% of the positive justifications of grades in the Penn State sample feature WI" (meaning the teacher) as subject. For example, "I gave your paper an A because you executed each aspect of the assignment well and wrote an especially strong conclusion." This technique heightens the praise by emphasizing that it comes from an expert, the instructor. It also allows the teacher to retain control over the discourse, even while acknowledging that the paper had an effect on him or her. (When negative, sentences justifying a grade in the Penn State sample conform to the "the paper" subject convention.)

But what were Smith's results exactly? 

And is there a point at which Smith talks about the ratio of justification comments? 

J Wolfe: In line with what I've been finding, it seems like most people want to talk about the quality and nature of teacher's comments, whereas I want to talk about how students take up other students' comments. How does students uptake of other students' comments affect their revisions as compared to expert comments? 

Writing." CCC ( 1982): 148-56. Sperling, Melanie and Sarah Freedman. "A Good Girl Writes Like a Good Girl." Written Communication 4 (1987): 343-69.

Beason, Larry. "Feedback and Revision in Writing Across the Curriculum Classes. RTE 27 (1993): 395-422. Brannon, Lil, and Cy Knoblauch. "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response." CCC 33 (1982): 157-66.

Zak, Frances. "Exclusively Positive Responses to Student Writing." Journal of Basic Writing 9 (1990): 40-53.

Others have researched the effect of comments on students' revisions. Melanie Sperling and Sarah Freedman, for example, found that one student consistently misinterpreted her teacher's marginal comments because the student did not share the teacher's knowledge and values regarding writing and revision. Larry Beason extended this research by identifying correlations between teachers' commenting aims and students' utilization of feedback. Still others have suggested that teachers should use alternative commenting methods, such as mentioning only the positive aspects of a piece of writing, in order to improve their responses (Zak).

&&&

x

x

x

 Joanna Wolfe’s (2002) research with undergraduate English students demonstrates that marginal comments influence students’ perceptions of the source text; passages with evaluative annotations are more effective than underlining in boosting student recall, while, interestingly, the perceived position of an annotator has the ability to shape readers’ responses to the text. For example, annotations by a professor, teacher, or person the student believes is an authority affect the way the text is received; accordingly, many students were “swayed in the direction of the gloss’s valence (i.e., positive evaluations uplifted students’ ratings of source arguments, and negative evaluations depressed their ratings)” (Wolfe, p. 319). Wolfe’s study confirms what many educators—from Erasmus to the current day—have known about the power of marginal commentaries to affect the reception and interpretation of a text. The ability of “negative” comments to affect how a reader relates to a source has pedagogical implications for writing practices as well as reading practices. For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative at the beginning, the student may disengage from the comments.

" to affect the reception and interpretation of a text"

"affect the way the text is received"

"swayed"

" For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative at the beginning, the student may disengage from the comments."

x

x

Some studies have investigated the degree to which annotations can be used by subsequent readers. Wolfe (2002, p. 300) considers not only the possibility that “the annotator’s presence can influence readers’ interactions with the source text” but she even goes further and imagines that “if students perceive the annotator as a potential reader of their own texts, they might envision a particular, opinionated reader already familiar with the source texts” (Wolfe, 2002, p. 301). Some research indicates that 914 JDOC 70,5 highlighting improves retention and that “readers of instructional material containing little or no typographical cueing may benefit from highlighting done previously by others (especially if done by students seen as high achievers)” (Fowler and Barker, 1974, p. 364)

x

elaine lees, "Building Thought on Paper with Adult Basic Writers"

Moffett

Beliefs, 

Self-certainty, 

Pittsburg, 

Discovery, 

 "discuss a time when you were creative and then go on to explain, on the basis of the incident you have described, what creativity means,"

x

Concrete operations Piaget, 

Moffett outlines a hierarchy of abstraction in discourse, from What he sees as the lowest level, recording of "what is happening" at present, through an intermediate level of reporting or narrating "what happened," to higher levels of generalizing about "what happens" and, finally; theorizing or arguing "what will (or) may happen." Moffett suggests organizing a curriculum by having it "recapitulate, in successive assignments, the abstractive stages across which all of us all the time symbolize raw phenomena and manipulate these symbolization." Moffett asserts that at every stage of life we are "constantly processing new experience up through the cycle of sensations, memories, generalizations and theories."3

x

to find ways of constructing talk about this subject at what Moffett would call differing levelS of abstraction

x

perhaps one way adult Basic Writers may rid themselves of their restrictive notions about writing is

to rework the gentraliz' ations and theories they have constructed about it. 

x

Post pedagogy, it’s trying to teach them, sequence, you see a lot of that in this book, 

x

a

right to consider themselves writers. 

x

to generalize from what they have described by drawing some conclusions about themselves as writers, based on the incidents they've written about in their papers.

x

to question the disparity between the textbook-like formulations they have very likely relied on to describe the activity of writing and the complex experience they have just had in constructing a paper.

x

to question where their ways of writing have come from and to see their accounts as constructions, not immutable givens.

x

begin to see themselves as constructors and construer

x

underestimate their own roles as builders.

x

they

say so little about the actual activity of writing. 

x

Someone usually offers the suggestion that "there really isn't much you can say about writing." The next question, then, becomes "What sorts of subjects do people have much they can say about' and students' answers are usually "subjects they're interested in," or, "subjects they know well or study a lot." A, teacher can point out that students are thus suggesting that what one can say about a subject is not so much a function of the subject a thing "out there," a received thing as it is a fiction of the writer's perception of the subject as problematic, as pen to exploration and ordering through language.

x

in which students give a name to what they find difficult about writing

x

to dramatize a connection between writing and thinking, to enable students to realize that acts of naming and renaming may be seen as acts of learning and may affect the outcome of their writing efforts.

x

to recognize that ways of addressing their problems as writers

fall within their own control.

x

the revision of language can be more than a "polish-

ing" process: the search for new words involves one in a search among

new thoughts, among statements about the word; and in making such

'choices one creates one's possibilities.

x

When one espouses a new theory, one possesses a new means of

interpreting experience, or rather a new means of experiencing. To

acknowledge theory's ordering power, the course's final assignment

brings students full circle, to a reconsideration of their first papers.

The students are asked to write again about the experience presented

in their first papers, this time "in the light of" or "in terms of" one of

their newly articulated theories. Then they are asked in class to

explain what difference writing "in terms of" the theories has made,

first, in the way their papers represent the experiences they had and,

second, in the way they now perceive themselves as writers. These are

difficult questions, but they are important ones for students who may

never have considered themselves theoreticians before.

x

the shuttling from particular to general,

from evidence to conclusions based on it, offers students insight into

some of the peculiarities of academic discourse. That this discourse,

for a term, has been about themselves and that it has grown, in their

own hands, from written narrative to written theory, further legiti-

mates these adult learners' re-entry into the academic world

x

they have begun to do something academics do to manipulate statements in ways that academics manipulate them. They have been involved in makir q ideas, not simply waiting for them to happen. They have had a chance to see that understanding of subjects like writing and change

is not rl..tach something one acquires as it is something each one, as a lang, t.-er, possesses the power to create.

x

“distrust their initial uptake” (p. 112).

This activity also offers a way to encourage students to reread without the trap of having the second reading become the instructor reading.


Although adherents of close reading have argued that one of its main goals is to foster independent readers (Shanahan, 2014), in practice, close reading can do the opposite, creating situations in which students read the text once to prove that they have read, but then wait for the instructor to reveal its true meaning. Certainly, educators can create situations in which students become responsible for these second and third readings and thus slowly gain confidence in their ability to examine texts not just according to what is being said but why and what the implications are, but they must do so with care to avoid the kind of trap that Bialostosky (2006) and others have discussed (see also Beers & Probst, 2013).


Moreover, as Bialostosky (2006) argued, it is often in these second or third readings that teachers reveal to students the “true meaning of the text,” teaching students to “distrust their initial uptake” (p. 112). That is, instructors need to be careful that the first reading does not become the student reading, and the second and third readings belong to the instructor, decreasing students’ motivation for reading even further.




The guides described in this section also focus solely on intensive reading practices, which McConn (2016) described as “reading the minimum number of texts required by the syllabus with a focus on the details” (p. 164) at the expense of extensive reading practices, defined by Carrell and Carson (1997) as “rapid reading of large[r] quantities of material...for general understanding” (p. 50). This is in spite of a lack of empirical evidence to support the former (Carrell & Carson, 1997; Hinchman & Moore, 2013; McConn, 2016).

"Studies that focus on contexts that instructors create for students’ reading..." (emphasis on "instructors")

Adler-Kassner, Linda and Estrem, Heidi. (2007). "Reading Practices in the Writing Classroom". WPA: Writing Program Administration, 31(1-2), 35-47.

Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) worry about how writing programs leave goals for reading unstated. They're worried about what's happening at a very high level of scale. They Part of their concern has to do with the fact that it's not popular to talk about pedagogies of reading in graduate education, which has the effect of leaving graduate students without the support to teach students how to read. This is a problem, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) suggest, because, while grad students know that they are suppose to be getting undergraduates to actively read, the grad students's practices might not be geared to making that happen. Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) use the phrase "fall back" at one point (p. 39). They're worried about grad studnets falling back into bad habits--those bad habits in this case being a conflation of the role of reading and reading itself (p. 37). Drawing on Sheridan Blau at one point, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) quote him with regard to his idea of  “the culture of interpretive dependence,” the assumption by teachers that their role is to tell students what reading is about—and the concomitant assumption by students that their role is to be told what reading is about (20-24)" (p. 39). At the same time, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) draw on Deborah Brandt in order to talk about how, in order for undergrads to produce a "good reading," they will have to "...analyze  the  ideals  and values associated with the “sponsoring” situation at the same time as they consider  how  their  own  contexts  and  experiences  affect  their  interpretations of the texts being read" (p. 38). In other words, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) do something similar to what Stuart Selber does with critical literacy, namely, students are supposed to analyze the situation of reading at multiple levels--the level of the personal, the programmatic, and the cultural. So the goal is, ostensibly, for students to analyze the encounter between different contexts, or perhaps even the context that's created as a result of that assemblage in that place at this time, etc. I wonder if this has anything to do with Malinowski's distinction between context of situation and context of culture. 

And here are just some key quotes: 

the critical need for composition instructors to carefully define how we want students to be as readers, and why, within the framework of  reading and writing in our classes, programs, and profession, participating in these ways is important for them as readers and writers. Leaving this work undone, undefined, unstated leaves yet another gap into which others can come and say, “here’s how you should do your work”

White's Law, sure, but then what if we want students to become something along the lines of the Liberal Arts curriculum that Perry outlines?

It’s important to note here that we have not asked how students read—that is, we are not asking how students interpret or use readings. Rather, we are interested in how “directions” for reading attempt to shape the roles that students play in reading and what ideological implications accompany those attempts. 

But isn't this exactly what I'm doing? 

composition’s frequently-repeated goal of finding a “third space” that can balance the perpetual tension between “inventing the university”—cultivating students’ acumen with conventions associated with academic genres while incorporating their ideas into them—and the desire to challenge the ideologies that are maintained by those genres at the same time (Bartholomae; also see Spellmeyer; Bizzell; Royster; Barwashi)

Isn't this Harris as well? Guess not. It sounds a lot like Coe maybe... This is Bartholomae: "students are supposed to relinquish prior language practices" (Mary Ann Cain).

Practice-based reading will also help readers navigate between what Sheridan Blau has identified as two “common and closely related misperceptions” about reading: “the widely held idea that there is only one authoritative and best interpretation for ... texts” implied in the idea of irreducibility, and “the opposite belief, which many students and some respected scholars think to be the logical alternative to the first position ... , that there is no single or authoritative interpretation for a literary text, ... [that] any and all interpretations have equal authority” implied in relationality (60). As Blau argues, both are myths—the boundaries around “acceptable” and “unacceptable” interpretations involve a performance that integrates one’s own interpretation and acknowledgement of the dominant interpretation, with a heavy dose of audience awareness thrown in.

And this just sounds like the two levels down in the Perry scheme. Dualistic and multiplistic, which is subordinated to relativistic. (see appendix below)

Thus, it is important to disentangle the complicated layers of reading expectations, cultural definitions of reading, student practices of reading, and the pedagogical imperatives surrounding reading in the writing classroom in order to examine and cultivate kinds of reading that we want students to perform. For some readers, the idea of asserting this much “control” over a role might seem shockingly teacher-directed—after all, don’t we want students to develop their own strategies, cultivate their own roles? Yes, but as the lenses adapted from Hanks’ work demonstrate, such relationally-informed performances have their limits. As with all of the read ing approaches described above, this reading must take place within (and with full understanding of ) conventions guiding the contexts in which they will interact as readers and writers. Just as “experienced writers understand that writing usually involves an element of role playing” (Clark), when readers develop strategies for inhabiting a variety of active roles, they are more comfortable moving among the various contexts for reading that they encounter.

That just sounds like Carillo, that last part "strategies for inhabiting a variety of active roles" (see appendix). And then there was this guy (Alexandria Peary) who seemed to capture the idea that "select the most applicable strategy" 

Of course, this approach to thinking about reading is, to some extent, prescriptive—after all, we are outlining distinct ways of reading that impose constraints on the possible range of interpretations that students are permitted. But just as Richard Straub argued that all instructor comments, even “non-directive” ones are really directive (and that it was more honest to not hide behind “suggestions” when those suggestions were invocations) (244-46), we would argue that the same holds true for reading. Reading theorists from Stanley Fish to Sheridan Blau have demonstrated that readers never interpret texts outside of communities (Fish) or cultures (Blau), and that those communities and cultures have vested interests in putting some boundaries around the range of possible interpretations. As Blau has put it, “our practice [of interpretation] is, in fact, governed by established disciplinary procedures that provide standards for distinguishing between valid and invalid interpretive claims” (75). 

And that sounds like Zizek. (see appendix below)

For some readers, something nearly unspeakable can happen during the reading process. The problem comes when instructors are unclear about what that sense of mystery and magic means, when they expect students to achieve it but are unable to identify its elements, when they forget that it comes as much from a synchronicity between a reader’s values and her interpretation of a text as from the context where the reading is done. When instructors expect magic, they sometimes take for granted that reading is a complex interaction between reader, text, and context. Student readers, too, sometimes find that the very mysterious nature of what instructors “want” brings them to complete frustration.

And so a tabulation of the (virtual?) background, like in wilder & wolfe (not Kaufer and Geisler, with whom you always mix it up). 

As James Gee has argued, there is always “a way (or the way) of reading a text,” and that way “is

only acquired ... by one’s being embedded (or apprenticed) as a member of a social practice wherein people not only read texts of this type in this way, but also talk about such texts in certain ways, hold certain attitudes and values about them, and socially interact over them in certain ways” (39-41).

And this of course is Downs (apprenticed), you need to email him

Appendix:

Perry maintains that most college students who construe reality from a dualistic orientation have already begun to realize that complex topics generate a diversity of opinion, but that they accommodate this diversity in terms of black and white. While these students might not believe that they themselves have access to knowledge about reality, they believe that legitimate authorities do. Thus, they confront diversity from dualistic orientations, unreflec- tively adopting the point of view of the "right" authorities, and dogmatically denouncing the position of the "wrong" ones. Other students, however, those who have confronted the fact that even good authorities do not know everything yet, and in at least some areas may never acquire total knowledge, have different metaphys- ical and epistemological assumptions. These students, who con- strue experience from a multiplistic orientation, might implicitly assume that objective reality exists, but they do not believe that it can be known without uncertainty. And since multiplistic students assume that absolute knowledge is not available to even the experts, they believe that one point of view is as valid as another. Finally, according to Kitchener and King, there are other students who, having been confronted by teachers and peers who have asked them to support their opinions with evidence and reasoning, come to approach the .experiences of college with reflective thinking constructs. These students accept the inherent ambiguity of knowledge and yet, through evaluating and analyzing alternative opinions, make judgments concerning which points of view probably offer better or worse approximations to reality. They realize that even though authorities cannot know reality without uncertainty, some perspectives are more rational or based on stronger evidence. Since reflective students understand the know- ing process to be fallible, however, their decisions are necessarily tentative and contingent upon reevaluation. (55-56) 

Slattery, P. (1990). Applying Intellectual Development Theory to Composition. Journal of Basic Writing, 9(2), 54–65.

And so, when students are frustrated by the elements of the text that remain inaccessible despite the eight questions the textbook provides, they may not be able to recognize that this is only one reading approach that happens to be failing them at that moment, and that they might more readily access the text using a different approach. Taught within a mindful reading framework, to read rhetorically is as much a deliberate decision as is the decision to abandon that approach and employ another in its place.

Ellen C. Carillo. (2016). Creating Mindful Readers in First-Year Composition Courses A Strategy to Facilitate Transfer. Pedagogy, 16(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3158573

This reflexivity undermines the notion of the Post-Modern subject free to choose and reshape his identity. The psychoanalytic concept that designates the short-circuit between the repression and what it represses is the superego. As Lacan emphasised again and again, the essential content of the superego’s injunction is ‘Enjoy!’ A father works hard to organise a Sunday excursion, which has to be postponed again and again. When it finally takes place, he is fed up with the whole idea and shouts at his children: ‘Now you’d better enjoy it!’ The superego works in a different way from the symbolic law. The parental figure who is simply ‘repressive’ in the mode of symbolic authority tells a child: ‘You must go to grandma’s birthday party and behave nicely, even if you are bored to death – I don’t care whether you want to, just do it!’ The superego figure, in contrast, says to the child: ‘Although you know how much grandma would like to see you, you should go to her party only if you really want to – if you don’t, you should stay at home.’ The trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice at all. Worse than that, he is being given an order and told to smile at the same time. Not only: ‘You must visit your grandma, whatever you feel,’ but: ‘You must visit your grandma, and you must be glad to do it!’ The superego orders you to enjoy doing what you have to do. What happens, after all, if the child takes it that he has a genuinely free choice and says ‘no’? The parent will make him feel terrible. ‘How can you say that!’ his mother will say: ‘How can you be so cruel! What did your poor grandma do to make you not want to see her?

zizek [at this link: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may!] 

Wilder, L., & Wolfe, J. (2009). Sharing the Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar: The Effects of Making Disciplinary Conventions Explicit in Undergraduate Writing about Literature Courses. Research in the Teaching of English, 44(2), 170–209.

Kaufer, D., & Geisler, C. (1989). Novelty in Academic Writing. Written Communication, 6(3), 286–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088389006003003

offering advice is the sort of authority that basic writers are used to

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.

what is On Justification about?

Boltanski, L. and L. Thévenot (2006 [1991]) On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

To best explain what B & T’s book is about, please allow me a moment to relate a brief representative anecdote, which ought to facilitate the explanation. I don’t have a car, and I haven’t for years. I have a drivers license, and I can drive. I just don’t own a car, and I haven’t owned on for a decade. Not owning a car for a decade has afforded me a privilege insight into car culture. Not driving is difficult—in America at least. The reasons why are manifold. For one, the entire country was designed around the automobile. The west coast is particularly bad. So, in L.A., for example, it’s pretty much impossible to get around without owning a car, since the city itself is so spread out, and the public transportation system isn’t that great. At the level of infrastructure, then, not owning a car is difficult in America. The infrastructure of America itself persuades you to own a car. However, owning a car also encouraged at the level of taxation. Purchasing a car is something you can subsidize. There are literally financial incentives to owning a car. The government subtly pressures you into owning one through subsidizes and write offs—or so I imagine. While I’m sure I could go on to list other reasons why people are pressured into purchasing automobiles (like how they're status symbols), the reason I want to focus on is the fact that owning a car is a good in itself. People buy cars because, say, it's good for the economy. It's downright American. What this means is, even if you have literally no reason for owning a car whatsoever, like I do, since I live right next to where I work, there is still a normative pressure to purchase a car. For example, I've heard rejoinders like, "Don't you want to be independent?" I don't really care to. I don't mind hitching a ride with a friend for that one time a month when I need to get across town--or, I just take the bus. Again, I could go on to tell you interesting stories about people's reactions to my not owning a car, but I've given you just enough context to understand what B & T's book is about. B & T's book is about one particular type of persuasion, how people are persuaded by situations to justify their actions by appealing to higher levels of generality (i.e., the common good). 

But why the metaphor? The metaphor is important because it clues us into an important aspect of this book, namely, what's new and exciting about it. On Justification is a work of sociology. Up until the point at which this book was published in France, which was in 1986, I think, sociology was governed by this guy Pierre Bourdieu. All French sociology was either explicitly or implicitly Bourdieuian. Bourdieu was particularly known for this idea of habitus, which states that you are subtly determined by where you come from. I can't put it any better than this:

In this kind of sociology, at least in the way it is seen by Boltanski (and I tend to share his view), the sociologist knows more about the actors than the actors themselves. Indeed when the actors think they behave on the basis of authentic desires, preferences, evaluations, the sociologist can always trace those mental states back to some habitus formation, to unconscious strategies, and ultimately to the structures of the field. For instance, I am quite sure that I like Beethoven because his music is very powerful, lying somewhere between the classical harmonies of Mozart and Haydn and the sometimes tiring excesses of romanticism. But in reality I like Beethoven because I am driven by my desire for distinction which tells me that, in the “petit bourgeois” academic world where I live, liking Beethoven is a necessity to be valuable. I just try unconsciously to follow the rules of the field. But as my semiproletarian habitus did not prepare me to naturally appreciate Beethoven, I cannot feel that the metallic sound of Herbert von Karajan – that was much favoured when I was young – Is now desperately out of fashion. (Jacquemain 1) 

Importantly, for Bourdieu, the habitus is located, fixed. 

To understand this better, we might ask for Bourdieu to explain why people are inclined to purchase a certain kind of car. He might say that people buy nice cars because they are either trying to reproduce a certain lifestyle or rather that they are trying to move up in the society's class structure. It's important to understand that Bourdieu's schema has great predictive power. For him, class power explains institutions. That is, something like class is necessary in order to explain why people would make super counterintuitive decisions--like buying a car you can't afford, or buying cars you don't need, etc. Either way, for Bourdieu, class is located. You can point to it. If you come from money, you can't escape the influence that the upbringing has on you. 

My point of turning to the metaphor is to underscore the idea that certain economies of persuasion don't have a fixed. locus. In a way, it's like Bourdieu is saying, if you completely redesigned a city, or if you redesigned a city around walking instead of driving, then people would stop driving, since you've eliminated the source of people's desire to drive (i.e., the infrastructure). However, people's motivations are much more complicated than that. As I was saying earlier, people's motivation to drive is tied not only to infrastructure or even culture, but also conceptions of the common good. And I think that last part is really key: culture influences decisions, certainly. In our culture, for instance, it's important for men to be seen as independent, as providers, and even as mobile. That culture exerts a pressure on men to purchase cars. But, similar to what we just saw with infrastructure, if you change the culture, that's not necessarily to say that people will stop buying cars--partly because of infrastructure, sure, but also because of how cars are imbricated in our conception of the common good. To stop buying cars would be bad, say, because of how tightly dependent the American economy is dependent on the automobile industry--gas station employees, factory workers, etc. 

What's at stake, though, isn't between culture and morals, I don't think, but rather between culture and certain ideas about what counts as just. For one, the latter are much older than the former. The latter have a long history, whereas the former are epoch specific. 

Either way, what is On Justification about? It's about a certain class of political ideas that are themselves persuasive, regardless of whatever content they're used to justify. Or rather, to be more precise, it's about a certain class of thought. When I was a study of Cathy Chaput, she'd lecture about the movement of idea to thought. So, for example, Friedrich Hayek came up with a bunch of ideas, then those ideas slowly reified into common sense (i.e., neoliberal doctrine). There's therefore a difference between certain political ideas and ideas that themselves have histories and have started to mediate entire ways of life. 

david harvey connection 

"The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class"

In "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class," Hawisher and Selfe (1991) argue that teachers of composition must be vigilant in order to prevent unwittingly reproducing dominant power structures. As of now, there's an overly optimistic discourse that pervades the fields of composition and/or computers and composition. Teachers talk about technology's pros, about how utopian it is, how it has the potential to erase power asymmetries and realize long-held educational ideals, etc., but they don't talk about technologies darker side--about how, for instance, teachers can draw on ed tech to surveil their students. Thus Hawisher and Selfe (1991) advocate for a more balanced, complete, truthful, etc. discourse about technology in the classroom--rather than the rhetoric of technology that's popular now ("rhetoric" being used in the bad sense, here).

Technology has the capacity to realize different relations between teacher and student, but we have to let it by being critical of the rhetoric of technology. But we also have to listen carefully to the technology itself, to how the technology has the capacity to change the nature of the situation (rather than just reproducing a prior situation).

How do we be critical though? or listen to the technology? let the technology itself be an agent? rather than the habit of prevailing education? By sticking to outcomes (64). That was one answer they hinted at.

My question is: how can we be architects--control f count = 1--of classrooms when we, well, aren't architects of the classroom? how can we be architects of technology without being masters of it? is it by turning to information architecture? by design practices? by misusing the technology? by making sure that the technology is making people's relationship to other people better? or is it by changing the architecture in a more literal sense? as in, learning how to advocate for the development of new infrastructure when we're tenured faculty? or maybe by not automatically thinking we have to use the technology? like: thinking of tech as a means to an end? rather than just an end in itself (like, because it's just a means, we can just as easily not use technology for this exercise...)?

"How do entrepreneurs hone their pitches? Analyzing how pitch presentations develop in a technology commercialization competition"

In Spinuzzi et al.'s (2015) "How do entrepreneurs hone their pitches? Analyzing how pitch presentations develop in a technology commercialization competition," they studied the the  sixth  year of  the Korea-based Gyeonggi-do Innovation Program (GIP), a program jointly run by the IC² Institute. From what I can tell, the program brokers between emerging Korean entrepreneurs and U.S. markets. The program provides a service. It claims to teach firms to how to better market their products in a U.S. market, though possibly elsewhere abroad too. But the program also provides feasibilities studies, which the firms get in the form of the Quicklook® report. So the program sends market researchers out into the field, and these researchers determine whether the product has a market in the U.S. or not, and, if so, what that market might look like or consist in. Mentors and judges use these reports as a basis on which to form their judgements of the firm's pitches. So, the GIP got over 200 applicants that year (2013), 25 made it to the semi-finals of the competition, and Spinuzzi et al. (2015) study four of those semi-finalists.

Here's a bit on the GIP:

Such consortia, according to Gibson & Conceiçao, attempt to “shorten  learning  curves  and  reduce  errors”  while  “provid[ing] access  to  regional,  national,  and  international  markets,  resources, and  know-how” ([10]  p.745;  cf.  Park  et  al.  [19],  Sung  &  Gibson [30]). Such programs implicitly emphasize understanding markets and  developing  value  propositions  that  speak  to  the  needs  of  the catchers;    they    typically    provide    actual    market    feedback appropriate  for  the  market  dialogue  we  discussed  earlier.  For instance, GIP contractors research a target market, identifying and interviewing  potential  stakeholders,  then  writing  results  in  the form  of  what  Cornwell  calls  a Quicklook® ([20];  to  understand Quicklook® revisions, see Jakobs et al.[11]), a type of technology assessment  and  commercialization  report  that  articulates  market feedback.   But   when   they   help   entrepreneurs   formulate   their arguments and revise them to address market feedback and needs, programs  such  as  the  GIP  typically  provide  tacit,  context-based support rather than explicit, systematic support. At the GIP, pitch decks    and    associated    genres    are    described    in    templates; instructions on how to conduct the dialogue are conveyed through a  team  of  mentors  with  different  backgrounds,  specialties,  and experiences.  Furthermore,  programs  such  as  GIP  tend  to  take  on entrepreneurs  operating  in  many  different  sectors,  pitching  to markets    with    differing    regulatory    constraints,    competitive landscapes, business developments cycles, and margins; this wide variation makes it difficult to systematize pitch development, and consequently  the  training  process  emphasizes  contingencies  and draws  heavily  on  the  situated  judgment  of  mentors such  as trainers. (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg)

Per usual, Spinuzzi et al. (2015)  gather data in the form of interviews, artifacts, observations, and surveys. They asked three questions:

RQ1:  What  kinds  of  feedback  did presenters  receive  in  the Quicklook®reports and training? 

RQ2: What changes did they make to individual pitch arguments between training and final pitches? 

RQ3: Do these changes correspond with favorable judges' scores?

To answer RQ1, they found that, in general, judges offered three kinds of feedback: (a) structure, (b) claims and evidence, and (c) engagement. For example, (a) you should add in these three slides at these specific locations in order to better fit yourself into the genre of the pitch; (b) you should qualify your claims, since you're not as original as you think you are (in fact, you should move from the known to the unknown via a matrix that shows how your product matched up against analogous product already in circulation in the U.S.); and (c) you should work on selling the point in person, say, by rolling the film, rather than just showing a still (and bring your product up on stage, while you're at it).

To answer RQ2, some firms changed more than others. However, despite Spinuzzi et al's (2015) claim that "...we saw similarities in how they took up and addressed specific kinds
of feedback in structure, claims and evidence, and engagement" (p. n. pg), I don't really see the similarities, save for the fact that they are all making changes to the feedback categories (structure, claims and evidence, and engagement).

To answer RQ3, as Spinuzzi et al. (2015) themselves admit, it's hard to say. One of the four firms clearly implements the feedback, which results in a co-constructed claim between rhetor and audience (see London et. al, 2015)--"co-constructed" being a good thing. It means something happened. An action took place. But some firms didn't score that well, partly because they didn't implement the feedback, but also partly because they probably thought it was pointless to do so (since the Quicklook® report had identified that the product had no market in the U.S.). Hence we arrive at a motif that we know well from other studies of revision, or even disability studies. It's best to get feedback as early as possible; that way, the feedback will arrive at a point in the development in which change is more realistic. Relatedly, one of the things that Spinuzzi et al. (2015) find is, despite the fact that feedback can be leveled at design, use, or argument, in technology commercialization competition such as this, it's only really possible to change the argument. Despite this limitation, the mentors/judges did in fact make a good point when changed seemed futile. They suggested to one firm that, instead of individually marketing these composters to households, they could market the tech as a factory you could leave garbage at.

While Spinuzzi et al. (2015) never really come right out and say this, or while they don't say this in quite so many words, I think they don't think the competition was run very well. Firms got the market research too late, which was made worse by the fact that judges had the feedback but, by convention, didn't give the firms the feedback until after the initial judgement. Moreover, the consortia didn't scaffold for some of the behaviors wanted its competitors to exemplify: "...they  wanted  to  know  whether  the presenters  could present  compellingly  to  US  audiences—a  factor  that included facility  in  English,  but  also  included  a  general  ability  to  connect (that is, a subjective evaluation that was not further characterized by subcriteria)" (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg).

Spinuzzi et al. (2015) also recommend that the Innovation Program grade the competitors differently; that is, instead of collapsing all of the metrics into a single score (1-4), they recommend that they be rated on different categories such as claims, evidence, engagement, structure, and so on.

Just a quote: "...allow   them   to consider market  feedback and  begin  incorporating  it  intodraft presentations.  It could    also soften    innovators    to    trainer suggestions,  perhaps  making  teams  like  K6017  more  likely  to adopt them" (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg). Soften.

I had some questions, though. Why was the composition of the authors different? Why was a psychologist on the team (Keela S. Thomson)?

I was also confused about the coding. Did they start by coding the slide decks. Did the emergent categories emerge from an analysis of those artifacts alone? and then were the same categories applied to other artifacts or observations? Quote: "Next, we applied the codes to trainer’s feedback videos, then used the   codes   to   identify   related   feedback   in   the   corresponding Quicklooks.   These   two   data   sets   represent   feedback   that presenters   received   between   their   training   and   final   pitch presentations.   By   coding   them,   we   identified   feedback   that appeared to influence the final pitch" (Spinuzzi et al., 2015, n. pg).

Is the rhetoric that Downs's turns to conversational?

Almost directly after I posted my last post on Downs, he posted this to the WPA-L. Interestingly, too, I read Bazerman's 1980 piece against expressivism, and in it he discussed the distinction between the conversation and the apprentice model. Is Downs's version of rhetoric not conversational?  I get a sense that what's going on here is similar to the disagreement between Spinuzzi and Carolyn Miller, the latter who thinks that activity theory isn't rhetorical. 

I also might add that Carillo and Downs seem to depart on a reading of activity theory. 

One way I've been thinking about Keith's question -- "why have we landed on a kind of reduced Aristotelian rhetoric ... as a commonplace of our courses (and, in spades, our textbooks)?" -- is by critiquing this reduction of rhetoric to "rhet-lite," substituting a few shards of vocabulary for genuine mindfulness and concrete meaningfulness. As happened with "process," our field has sufficiently emphasized the importance of rhetoric that secondary ed and factory-comp now both routinize it ("logos-ethos-pathos!"), squeezed of most meaning and invoked largely as shibboleth. Keith's critique of the resulting generalities seems fair. 

So I certainly don't want to (re)teach rhet-lite. But I do see a need for, and advantage in, teaching a rich contemporary rhetoric despite Keith's hints that if it's teachable it's probably drained of meaningful specificity to begin with, and that writers get by pretty well without explicit knowledge of rhetoric. To an extent I agree with both goads, but I think that in a couple ways, good rhetorical instruction can make however competent a writer more competent.   

1. Part of why Aristotelian rhetoric gets "lite" so quickly is because we (western cultures since its recovery in the 19th/20th cents) place WAY more weight on it than it can (or ever could) carry. Classical rhetoricians in the Aristotelian line tried to deduce the entirety of rhetorical principles from a tiny set of rhetorical situations involving an even tinier set of (privileged and thus non-representative) audiences. That was never going to work. But contemporary rhetorical theory / research has been widely expanding that ground. Sometimes by recovering understanding that did inhere in classical, particularly sophistic, rhetorics but got ignored by the platonic tradition; I'm thinking, for example, of incredibly rich work done on ethos by current rhetoric scholars. Sometimes by responding to the wildly richer array of scenes of rhetoric available to us now as compared to Greek times, expanding our ways of thinking about rhetoric in directions that, quite frankly, simply matter more than much of what Aristotelian rhetoric has come down to us as; here I'm thinking, for example, of rhetorical ecology as elucidated the past three decades. Sometimes through investigation of indigenous rhetorics and rhetorics of dis/ability -- so much amazing work being done on ways rhetoric works outside white, male, ableist cultural expectations. (Apologies if I leave your favorite line of contemporary rhetorical inquiry out of this quick set of examples.)  

Because rhet-lite (a not-very-rich version of Platonist/Aristotelian rhetoric) is more or less ubiquitous background knowledge for many entering college students now, what we need to be teaching of rhetoric in college writing courses is this richness that typically undermines the more simplistic rhetorical understandings. What do we get by adding rhetorical ecology to rhetorical situation, for example, or shifting the focus of ethos from "credibility" to "place and way of being"? Contemporary rhetorics counter various misconceptions of writing that are usually reified or at least not challenged by Aristotelian rhetoric: the lone inspired writer / dictator; the sender-receiver communication model; linear process; the deprecation of emotion / pathetic appeal; the generalization of "audience" into gross types (y'know, young men, middle-aged men, old men); the notion that rhetors are speakers but not listeners; on and on.  

So for me, teaching a rich, contemporary set of rhetorical principles, not Aristotelian rhet-lite, is a crucial path to addressing cultural misconceptions of writing and writing process, and helping students with limited writing experiences beyond school and interpersonal/social-media uses prepare for writing in other scenes (professional, civic, etc.).  

2. I also feel bound to teach various contemporary principles of rhetoric because I think awareness, mindful deliberateness, helps. What I'm reaching for here is the space created by the truths that a) if I try to learn to ride a bicycle, or try to ride a bicycle, by analyzing the physics/biology/chemistry of the activity, I'm pretty likely not to ride the bicycle well, or at all -- but yet b) the world's best bicycle riders know a whole damn lot about the physics of bicycles and the biochemistry of riding them, and that knowledge improves their riding. I don't want to mistake rhetorical theory for writing, and I don't want to say that you have to know rhetorical theory to write, and I don't want to say that rhetorical theory is the best way to teach writing. (I'm pretty sure that the best way to teach writing is to assign a lot of it and then talk and write a lot about what gets written and then write it some more.) But for myself as a writer, for some other writers I've observed, and from what I hear from a fair number of students, there is something really helpful to a writer about being about to understand the why's and how's of the ways writers craft writing for users, and the things writers have to think about to do this, from contemporary rhetorical perspectives. From "here's why the people telling you not to use pathos appeals are so often using pathos appeals themselves and why you should too" to "this is a really complex writing situation and you can think deliberately about all the rhetors in this ecology who are making it so," a rich rhetorical awareness and mindfulness expands a writer's available options and understanding and in many ways can bring some peace of mind, or at least clarity, to otherwise muddled and hazy situations. (Short form: rhetorical awareness strongly assists, or may even be damn near identical with, metacognition.)  

So I want to use rich contemporary rhetorical theory (and there is no way to boil it all down to single a routinized account that can be taught in a single class) to, basically, help writers grow more powerful than when they enter my class.  

As to the underlying question -- why do rich systems of thought get wrung out, oversimplified, ossified, and packaged into unrecognizability when we create teaching systems, aids, resources, and curricula -- well, that would require a broader critique of western civilization at least back to Ramus. On that basis always questioning my continuing participation in higher ed --
Doug

"Go or No Go: Learning to Persuade in an Early-Stage Student Entrepreneurship Program"

Spinuzzi et al.'s (2019) "Go or No Go: Learning to Persuade in an Early-Stage Student Entrepreneurship Program" aims to assess whether an early-stage accelerator program effectively teaches its students to develop their businesses's value propositions. 

To conduct this assessment, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) subjected a sample of the program's cohort (n = 8) to an exploratory, qualitative study. In doing so, they collected a variety of different kinds of data (interviews from participants and mentors, slide decks, feedback forms, observations, videos, and surveys), and they interpreted their data vis-à-vis Vogel's three stages of a venture's development. 

Spinuzzi et al. (2019) found that the program was most effective to the group it intended to enroll in the first place, namely, entrepreneurs who were at Vogel's stage two: concepts. However, strangely, only two of the eight in Spinuzzi et al.'s (2019) sample were at this stage, leaving me to wonder: was this small sample representative? Either way, it's strange that so few entrepreneurs were at that stage. All in all, a few entrepreneurs were still at stage one (idea), only a few were at stage two (concept), I think (Spinuzzi et al., 2019, p. 118a), and one was even at stage three (opportunity). Adding to the confusion here is another distinction, the distinction between technology-first and problem-first firms. To be more specific, then, SEAL--the early-stage accelerator program--marketed itself to technology-first firms that were at Vogel's stage two (concept). So, regardless of the specifics, not many firms met the characteristics the accelerator program designed its curriculum for. Yet, the few firms that did fit those characteristics seemed to get the most out of the program. 

Spinuzzi et al. (2019) identified another problem, this one being that the program didn't explicitly teach teams how to iterate their value propositions. Part of the problem, though, was firm's initial orientation. Apparently, based on prior research, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) determined that a service-dominated logic (SDL) is a more effective orientation for early-stage technologies (the orientation is more persuasive because the people who are buying into the technology are less interested in the technology itself). So, the firms that were tech first, which is, again, the kind of firm that the program was marketing itself to in the first place, had the most trouble developing their value propositions. Put differently, problem-first firms had the easiest time transitioning to a SDL, unsurprisingly, because they were only attached to the technology as a means to an end. Now this is me going out on a limb, but I think the problem is, SEAL didn't fully appreciate a tech-first firm's needs. Sure, out of necessity, the firms developed a technology without an eye to how it would be applied in the future, which is why they need the program's help. Or, as Spinuzzi et al. (2019) say, 

...the objective of the program is this Go/No Go decision. Firms leave the program with clarity on whether the business is worth pursuing. That is, firms come into the program  with  a  venture  idea;  they  use  the  program  to incubate a venture concept; and at the end of the program, they decide whether to exploit a venture opportunity [20]. SEAL’s Go/No Go decision thus orients teams such as W1 toward making an evidence-based argument to themselves and others: can this innovation anchor a viable business? (p. 113)

Surely because of the weddedness to the technology rather than a problem, the tech-first firms have a problem transitioning to an SDL orientation. I don't know how to spell out this link exactly, but it would seem like, precisely because of this trouble, the program ought to explicitly teach firms how to develop their value propositions. In fact, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) imply that the program seems to assume that the means to develop a value proposition is a given. Instead, the program ought to aim to develop students' cognitive capacities to shift the conception of a product's market pain to fit a variety of audiences, which would imply a recognition that both firms and audiences co-construct a product's value proposition (London at al., 2015). 

Aside from those recommendations, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) also recommend that the program admit more selectively; that way, they can only admit the students their program is designed to help (tech first, stage 2). Moreover, Spinuzzi et al. (2019) recommend that they appoint each firm a case manager, that way the firms can get more individualized attention, since the manager can drawn on his/her connections to identify what mentors the firms will find most relevant. 

I do have some questions, though. I get why Spinuzzi et al. (2019) triangulated their claims. But why did they even seek to get a sense of the initial understanding of their challenges? and how did reading the kickoff mentor forms against the initial interview statements about their challenges constitute a triangulation of this data point and/or goal? did the study have more than two conditions? and did this condition--if it was one--have to do with the explicit/implicit binary? 

What's more, was it a bad sample? Because I find it strange that only two firms were of the right kind. 

Whatever the case, I feel like what's at stake here is similar to a problem that compositionists know well. The students who need FYW the most don't get enough from it because of how they are predisposed. Inversely, the students who don't really need the class that much (again, because of how they are predisposed) get more from it. Put differently, the class suffers from a preaching to the converted problem, which is itself intensified by a bad marketing problem. I feel like this double problem applies to the incubator too. So, the real question is, how do we get these entrepreneurs to sense the nature of the situation? how can we train them to see what expert entrepreneurs see? and to shift the product's justification given the audience's needs? 

... entrepreneurship training programs such as SEAL should explicitly teach value proposition iteration strategies,  aligning  them  with  the  incubation  stage. Specifically, value propositions could be taught as claims and reinforced with exercises that encourage entrepreneurs to  explore  how  different  claims  can  persuade  different stakeholders. Furthermore, exercises could help firms to recapitulate their core claims across the various genres they must produce, from elevator pitches to funding pitches to marketing materials. (p. 119)

Another question (to Spinuzzi) would be, did the accelerator end up implementing this advice? or is it too soon to tell?

I was surprised at how similar this study was to a curriculum design job. Spinuzzi et al. (2019) were asking questions like, does the program's scaffolding scaffold for what it was intended to? did the program do what it said it was going to do? Prior to this IEEE article, I didn't catch the similarity of Spinuzzi's work to programmatic assessment. There's a lot of literature out there about how to assess a writing program. But how do you assess an organization that only exists ephemerally and has so many moving parts? Naturally, such assessment jobs are the bread and butter of what Spinuzzi does. 

Lastly, I might add, why didn't Spinuzzi et al. (2019) take the structured programing--I think it was called--into account (like the video lectures)? They observed the Lunch and Learns, sure. But they seemed to skip right over a lot of the other scaffolding, focusing so closely on the pitch deck.   

I would be interested in asking whether the recommended exercises would be able to produce in the entrepreneurs the desired capacity. Of course, I have no idea whether they were implemented after the fact. But would they effective? Or can that kind of stuff only be developed over long scales of time?