Carolyn Ellis's Shattered Lives

This opportunistic but evocative autoethnography focuses on the experiences of Ellis on and after the terrorist attacks of September 11^th. She was a solo passenger on an airline headed for Virginia when the pilot announced they would be landing in Charlotte, NC due to terrorist attacks in NYC. She started writing this immediately after the attacks and continued writing and revising over a period of several months, tracing her experiences from Sept. 11^th 2001 to Jan 2002. She used this writing as a form of catharsis for herself, to help her reframe the experience to have some meaning within her life. However, she also wants to demonstrate why the “everyday stories” of Sept 11^th—those stories from people who were not in NYC that day or who did not lose loved ones in the attacks—deserve to be told and how telling those stories can help those individuals reframe the experience for themselves, as telling her story helped her to reframe and heal. She also hopes that this piece may start a dialogue among social scientists and qualitative researchers to help in understanding and coping with the tragedy.

Ellis works chronologically through the events of Sept. 11^th, providing commentary on her thoughts and on her surroundings, documenting the confusion she was feeling and that others appeared to be feeling. She discusses blame, fear, and hatred, and a general sense of being uncertain of what to do next and how the world and her life will go on. She provides conversations with and quotes from others to illustrate her feelings and provide insight into theirs, though the accuracy of these quotes and conversations can be called into question because she wrote these from memory and not from extensive recorded and transcribed conversations. She also mentions phone calls and how long certain calls would last (based on her bill) as well as her memory of how many attempts were necessary before she got through. This ethnography is primarily a sample size of 1, severely limiting generalizability.

Her writing that occurs in Oct. centers on Ellis’s attempts to make sense of the attacks. She describes a sense of “looming vulnerability” (395) that expresses a fear of further loss, making her feel “depressed, anxious, and fearful” (395).  She feels that harnessing these feelings through framing and sense making may help her gain healing and control. Ellis had to reframe her perception, first accepting that terrorism did and can happen then examine other frames in her life at that time that also had an influence—her location on an airplane at the time of the attacks and her personal experience with loss (her mother and mother-in-law in poor health at the time and a brother who died in a plane crash 20 years before). She does state that “unpredictability, fear, fragility, and looming vulnerability continue to be a part of my daily life” (400). She wants to attempt to control or deny these feelings, but fears this may lead to “psychic numbing” that may prevent the integration of terrorism into her new life scheme. According to Ellis, understanding offers the possibility of turning something chaotic into something potentially meaningful” (401). She uses her writing to dive further into the tragedy, choosing to express the importance of personal stories to provide healing, hoping to influence others to do the same.

Ellis suggests that we are “humbled by looming vulnerability” (401) and that the fear and vulnerability everyone felt led to a sense of collective belonging, a renewed appreciation for life, and helped us understand those who never had the illusion of the safe world. “I face the terror in hopes that it will help me (and others) live more giving and rewarding lives. At the very least, I face the terror to find ways to talk about experiences of vulnerability in an unpredictable and dangerous world” (403).

Ellis ends with a discussion of an experience in January 2002, which Ellis visited Ground Zero, and discovers that being at Ground Zero was not about seeing but about “feeling and remembering” (407). She asserts that within the tragedy of Sept 11^th lies a variety of lessons that we risk forgetting if we try to repress our feelings. She suggests instead that we turn to framing and sense-making to tell our personal stories, no matter how insignificant they may seem.

Learning the Trade: A Social Apprenticeship Model for Gaining Writing Expertise

Taylor Stukes

Beaufort, Anne. “Learning the Trade: A Social Apprenticeship Model for Gaining Writing Expertise.” Sage Publications, Inc. WRITTEN COMMUNICATION, Vol. 17 No. 2, April 2000. 185-223. Pdf.

Research Questions:

·         What differentiated simpler from more complex (and higher status) writing tasks?

·         What determined writers’ social roles in this particular community of practice?

·         What methods of socialization were used for writers new to this organization, and to what effect?

Objects of Study:

Primary (ideal): An ideal object of study would be new employees who have not yet or have recently been socialized to an organization. Writing would need to be one of the primary tasks of the employee.  

Secondary (actual): In the article, Beaufort reports on part of her results from a larger ethnography of a nonprofit organization. Two of the organization’s new writers, Pam and Ursula, (at the time of the study) are the subjects of this study.

There is a relationship between the ideal and actual object of study but because of the small number of participants and the size & goals of the nonprofit organization, it would be hard to generalize the study.  

Procedure/Method:

Data collection: weekly interviews (informal and open-ended) & photocopying all of the writing the women complete each week (data collection lasted for one year) Triangulation? Yes. The last paragraph of page 194 explains their process to ensure triangulation.

Analysis: “Data analysis was an iterative process of looking at field notes, interview transcripts, and writing samples for patterns and themes in relation to social roles for writers within the discourse community of [the nonprofit organization]” (193).

This method of data collection did not take into account any coaching, peer relationships, or other attitudes. Beaufort doesn’t really do anything to overcome the problem other than recognize it in the article.  

Theories:

Three theories combined to create the theoretical framework of this study:

1.       Genre Theory – forms of texts are fluid and responsive to the values and purposes of the communities of writers who use them. One type is “discourse communities” in which readers and writers carry out the social goals of the community.

2.       Theories of expertise: (1) global, general knowledge and skills for problem-solving in novel situations; (2) local, context-specific knowledge

3.       The social component in learning processes//theory of the zone of proximal development

It seems that the findings of this study did support the theories above.

 Overall Generalization:

Beaufort states that the data reported provides an “alternative conceptual framework for assessing the complexities of writing tasks, a writer’s developmental paths, and what it means to socialize a writer into a discourse community” (218). This is a pretty hefty generalization. Considering the size of the study, I don’t know that this is an appropriate generalization. Much of the conclusion consists of her discussing the how the theories of the study play into schools and the problem of establishing authentic social purposes for writing, even though that really doesn’t have anything to do with the research questions that she asked. It seems as if Beaufort has started a conversation for further research in the field. 

Designing protocol studies of the writing process: An Introduction

Taylor Stukes

Flower, Linda S., Hayes, John R. and Swarts, Heidi. “Designing protocol studies of the writing process: An introduction.” R. Beach and L. Bridwell. New Directions in Composition Research. New York: Guliford, 1984.

What can protocol studies contribute to our understanding of the writing process? What kinds of studies can be done?

Definitions

Experimental Protocol: an innovative & powerful research tool developed by cognitive psychologists. Works by sequentially recording a subject’s attempts to perform a task

Protocol Analysis: Theory-driven form of research demanding vigorous analysis

·         Strengths: weed out half-formed initial hypotheses & add substance and depth to a theory-driven analysis

·         How do they work?

o    Develop hypothesis à Derive it from a coding scheme à Find hypothesis disconfirmed

Techniques of Protocol Gathering

·         Thinking Aloud Writing Protocols: Subjects are recorded as they state their thoughts during a timed writing task. After, the recordings are transcribed for coding.

·         Protocol analysis gives detailed data about the subject’s processes of planning, goal-setting, decision-making, and revising

·         Retrospective Studies: Subject reports on writing process after the fact; many limitations accompany this type of study

Preliminary Parsing

1.       There is no paragraphing in a protocol, so typist should number lines and pages. Clauses are the most basic way to measure the subject’s utterances.

2.       Match the notes against the protocol (what are they reading v. what are they writing)

3.       Chart the first appearance of ideas, notes & sentences in relation to their order in the final text

4.       Episodes: Units of activity in which subject’s compose

Coding Writing Processes – driven by the research question being asked & the researcher’s definition of the phenomenon in question

·         Planning: includes generating & organizing ideas, goal-setting (content and process goals)

·         Translating: includes creating formal written text & versions the subject tries out orally

·         Reviewing: includes reading, evaluating, and making changes in the text

Using Protocols in Writing Research

1.       Exploratory Studies: explore uncharted territory, can generate more specific questions

2.       Studies that give a problem structure with a taxonomy or hypothesis

3.       Comparative Studies: Examine differences between age groups, skill levels, etc.

4.       Studies that model writing processes

Reliability in Protocol Analysis

·         Like looking at clouds, people will see different things (68)

·         Agreement among investigators, developed coding scheme for judges to use

·         Ensure judges are familiar with researcher’s theory or context

Stories of Three Editors

Thompson, Isabelle K and Joyce M. Rothschild. “Stories of Three Editors: A Qualitative Study of Editing in the Workplace.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 9.2 (1995): 139-169. PDF.

In their qualitative study, Thompson and Rothschild observed three editors in a government publications agency to find an answer to the question, “What is the role and responsibility of an editor in a corporation?” In the beginning of their essay, they show that most of the research about writing is from a composition studies perspective and that little information exists about the editing process. Thus, their research is designed to understand more about the complexities of editing.

Since their primary concern is the editing process itself, they decided to study this process by focusing on three editors who make up the entire editing unit of their company. The authors chose these editors because of their “extensive and varied experience in editing and because the organizational characteristics of the unit are well documented” (141). The authors do not share why they chose this specific publications agency. Because of the observational nature of their research, these subjects offer valid insight into the editing process. One editor is a publications specialist and the other two are assistant editors. However, each editor holds the sole responsibility for the texts given to her. So while they share similar jobs, they are independent of each other. The authors use this relationship to help in generalizing data. As Thompson and Rothschild point out, the generalizations only relate to this one government agency but they may provide new hypotheses to test with further research.

They collected data in three phases. First, they collected publications from the agency and edited samples from the editors. They also chose an open-ended interview style to question each editor. Second, they “analyzed changes in the edited documents and conducted a focused interview with each editor to determine the reasons for some of the changes” (142). Finally, they created descriptions based of the material gathered and interpreted and checked them with each editor. In order to analyze the changes made on specific documents, Thompson and Rothschild used an “informal classification system” (142), which included the categories of content, format, arrangement, syntax, correctness, and consistency with styles guides. These categories helped them to generalize about the thought-process behind each change made by the editors. In order to make sure their open-ended questions would produce the most definitive answers, they checked the questions with an editing specialist who had worked for at least 10 years in this agency.

Although the information they were interested in is very informal and experimental, the study could have been improved with a random sample. The subjects were all female, and Thompson and Rothschild made the generalization that the editors were treated as more of support-role staff because of their gender. However, as Winsor points out in her article “Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering,” many technical writers are viewed by design specialists as supporters rather than contributors as well, so perhaps gender does not play as large a part in this view as the role itself. A random sample including males could have changed this generalization.

While it is unclear which theories directly guided the authors’ research, they referred to Ann Berthoff’s study concerning composition and Flower et al. and Hayes et al.’s “diagnose/revise” and “detect/rewrite” strategies in their generalizations. These two studies may or may not have instigated the study, but Thompson and Rothschild’s findings were in line with these theories.

The authors’ generalizations are very basic to this specific study. For example, they found that although the editors do not view themselves as creative, they actually exercise a large amount of creativity and personal expression in what they choose to change. But this information is relevant only to the group studied. As mentioned earlier, the authors hope that their discoveries will shed light on the editing process and prompt further research, but they make no assumptions that their research can be generalized beyond these three editors in this government publications agency.

The Pregnant Pause: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Planning

Flower, Linda, Hayes, John R. “The Pregnant Pause: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Planning.” Research in the Teaching of English 15.3 (1981): 229-248. Print.

“What happens as writers pause? And if pausing reflects planning, as many assume it does, what is the nature of that planning?” (229) Researchers are particularly interested in the prolonged “pregnant pauses” of the composing process. They formulate two hypotheses that may answer these questions.

Hypothesis 1: The Linguistic Hypothesis: “Writers pause in order to generate or plan what they are going to say next” (230).

Citing Matsuhashi, Perl, and a previous study of their own, Flower and Hayes discuss Basic Writers and their preoccupation with sentence-level planning and the topic itself. Exclusive dependence on sentence-level planning, then, may be the mark of a poor writer. These writers often reread a sentence then pause to reflect before continuing, which reflects the nature of conversations in which planning too far ahead is quite impossible.

Hypothesis 2: The Rhetorical Hypothesis: “When people pause for significant lengths of time, they pause in order to carry out more global rhetorical planning or problem-solving which is not necessarily connected to any immediate utterance or piece of text” (230).

This rhetorical planning may be the mark of a more advanced writer who considers the audience and his/her goals for the text itself. While they may deal with content, they are doing so to determine what is important and how to arrange it. This requires the writer to envision the entire structure of the text and integrate all constraints.

Flower and Hayes used 4 subjects (3 experts and 1 novice) but fail to address how and why these subjects were chosen. They also note that the recording of 1 expert was not available during analysis, but do not address why. This study used think-aloud protocols to discover what thought processes occur during the pauses during composition found in previous studies. Subjects were asked to verbalize as many of their thoughts as possible while composing.

Flower and Hayes assert that composing occurs in episodes. To further explore this, they asked 4 ‘knowledgeable’ judges who have studied the protocol carefully to mark where writer seemed to shift focus or set up a new plan as well as 4 ‘intuitive’ judges and 22 writing researchers attending a protocol analysis seminar who did not know the protocol and were instructed to “use their intuition to make meaningful episodes in a writer’s thought process.” No other information is given on these readers. Flower and Hayes cite several measures of agreement between these judges, comparing them to predictions from a probability test in order to indicate the level of inter-rater reliability.

Results are demonstrated through summaries, statistics, and tables of data. Flower and Hayes determined that episodes seem to be organized around goals rather than topics and boundaries between episodes. Changes in paragraphs and topics are both poor predictors of major episode boundaries, but goal-related activities are strong predictors of episode beginnings. It seems, then, that the episodic pattern of planning is actually independent of content. Flower and Hayes also discuss the form of the rhetorical planning in these goal-related activities, which can take the form of content goals, process goals, and acting on a previously enunciated goal. These plans and goals work together to form a network to provide logic and structure, and this network appears to be the source of the pregnant pause. They admit that a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this particular paper, indicating a potential future area of research.

This particular study is a case study, which means that generalizations cannot be made from it; further research would be required in the form of experiments. Flower and Hayes fail to really make this point clear in their writing, though they do admit many of their limitations and hint towards future research.