formulaic writing, tutoring, and K/knowledge

[newma_sl@JHUVMS.HCF.JHU.EDU]

Dear Centaurs,

Sorry for coming so late into the discussion about formulae and writing; 
my time's been consumed by a move from downtown Balmur into the quieter 
environs of Catonsville (sad to leave the city proper, but the rents and 
car insurance are easier on grad student types like myself. . .).  In any 
case, I'd like to pick up on the sub-thread that asks about the relation 
of forms of writing to tutoring.  

As with most writing centers, ours at Hopkins has tried to deal with 
these issues from the beginning.  More specifically, we were concerned 
about how to deal with two issues: 1) not appropriating the teaching that 
was going on in class _x_, a particular concern for a Center just 
starting up;  and 2) encouraging our clients to become 
familiar with the forms of academic discourse they were bumping up 
against and would bump up against in the future so that they wouldn't 
feel as if they were writing in the dark.  The hope is that they would be 
able to enter into some kind of meaningful dialogue--with the tutor's 
help--with these forms.

To this end, one of the distinctions I tried to introduce to our staff 
during my term as director was between what I called Knowledge and 
knowledge, and I'd like to know what you all think of this approach, 
whether you do something similar, find this distinction problematic, 
etc. 

 The capital K in "Knowledge" 
refers not to anything like its objective status but rather the 
generality of its distribution.  That is, forms that were common either 
to academic writing as a whole or to a specific discipline--say, the 
expectation common in many literature papers to enter into close dialogue 
with a quote the writer has selected, whether this reading would then be 
put to use for arguments about genre, period, etc.  Small "k" knowledge 
refers to those rules of a course peculiar to Professor _X_ or _Y_.  If 
we sensed that these were the primary concerns at hand, then I 
suggested that we might want to question the student more closely about 
what the instructor had said about the assignment or had said on the 
syllabus or in comments to the student about previous papers. Also 
included here were specific texts about, say, the Conception of Race in 
Antebellum Louisianna that grad. student x might know from his or her 
seminars or dissertation. On the whole, I directed the staff to work 
toward Knowledge and steer away from knowledge (as I use these terms 
now, I feel like switching the two, since capital-K Knowledge feels more 
to me like a practical _art de faire_ instead of the Official knowledge as 
enforced by an instructor.)  My rationale was that this approach would 
tend to give the student a broader sense of the models in play he or she 
would be likely to see and would also give him/her and the consultation 
itself some distance from the demands of the instructor.  While 
introducing forms might risk negatively appropriating the 
instructor's teaching--"that's not _my_ idea of what a history paper 
looks like"--this approach would have as its justification that it was 
invoking broad forms that would not be limited to a particular class.  At 
least as important as this justification was its utility to the student, 
since, after all, Writing Centers exist not to worry about upsetting the 
faculty but rather to help students.

Of course,  the messiness of disciplinary boundaries (and 
the intense debates within departments as to their 'proper' object of 
study) make these terms heuristic rather than definitional.  But what they 
sparked was a series of papers by some of the staff as to the 
conventions of their disciplines as they understood them--some of the 
most interesting ones were from the undergraduates. These helped the 
tutors who wrote these short pieces to become more self-conscious about 
their disciplines and helped to educate the tutors from outside their 
disciplines about conventions unfamiliar to them. In 
addition to these more-theoretical debates about the boundaries of 
disciplines, I also noticed that the tutors, myself included, felt a 
little less-anxious about alluding to disciplinary conventions, though it 
was something I encouraged us to do carefully, by being as explicit as 
possible with our clients that these conventions were not always 
appropriate.  One of our mottos at the center was to make the principle 
as present and clear as possible.  

In any case, as I said, I'd be curious to know what y'all think of this 
as a heuristic. 

Best,

Steve Newman
Johns Hopkins