Ede's "Writing as a Social Process"

Lisa Ede in “Writing as a Social Process” opens with the idea that theory and practice must be joined for one’s professional life to come together gracefully and with a sense of grounding. To exemplify this, she writes of her struggles balancing her scholarship with her role as the director of her university’s writing center. Later in the essay, she asserts that this problem of theory and practice is a common one for writing center directors. These individuals are so busy with the writing center director role that it is hard to find time to take theorize on their work. As a result, Ede gives some areas for research that writing center directors can begin to work on theorize about, such as the role of collaborative writing within the writing center.  In this sense, Ede’s essay becomes a call to action for writing center directors who know that their scholarship must match their practice.

Though this may be a stretch, reading Ede’s essay was interesting for me since I come from multiple academic backgrounds, though all have been related to English (creative writing, literature, composition/writing studies). The problem is that though all these areas fall within English studies, the ideologies do not always correspond. Since I have background in literature and creative writing, I have been working on finding ways to bring these fields together with what I am learning in my studies on rhetoric and writing so that I can incorporate previous knowledge into my dissertation. For example, (and I’m taking this whole discussion from my own limited understanding) within postmodern rhetoric the concept of “authorial voice” does not exist. I assume postmodern rhetoricians believe this because of the idea of multiplicities and the idea that nothing is stable, and voice, once established, creates a sense of stability and unity for a grouping of text by an individual author. But once one places the idea that voice does not exist within creative writing pedagogy, that pedagogy falls apart because so much instruction hinges upon the creation and finding of one’s voice. I also feel that such an argument has the potential to devalue literature since voice is also a common construct to discuss literary works. We can use common tropes and experiences of the author to link all their works, but it is important to note that the construction of authorial voice plays a role as well.

             So one of my challenges as a graduate student here has been to find ways to make previous knowledge applicable to what I am doing now and to work to find intersections amongst all the differing ideologies. In many ways, I think this is also what Ede and Lunsford are attempting to do throughout their book.

Questions:

1.                    For those who have worked in writing centers: what are some other ways of bringing theory and practice together?

2.                    Do you think there is another way the academic system could help out writing center directors with the problem of making scholarship and practice intersect and even making more space for it?

3.                    Can you think of other areas where a similar problem happens between making theory applicable to practice? (haha, graduate students? ;) )