Steinmann: Mode or modality?

In part two of Writing Together, I am intrigued by the “feminist leanings.” At first, while reading about the secretary who collaborated (w/c?) with Dick Miller on writing projects, I noted, perhaps because of the job-descriptive word we are no longer to use, the authors report two very telling things:

1.“…the satisfaction comes when the chairman or governing board says ‘You have done a great job.’ That is the satisfaction. I don’t think about private authorship or anything like that; I just want to know if I did a good job” (107, emphasis mine).
2.“Like many executives, Miller relies heavily on his secretary, who in fact plays a significant role in the collaborative writing that occurs in his office” (ibid).

These two things come within the results part of what at first appears to be an IMRAD-type report by Lunsford and Ede, so of course discussion is saved for later. However, the discussion in this section does not mention anything about the above-mentioned result. The authors have already noted that their research cannot be completed in a way that eschews narrative, and they do keep revising their research methods, but it is not until a later paper (1990) that they begin to talk feminism. Their bias(es), however, have been evident from the start. On page 93, they write: “when we first chose those we hoped to interview, we determined that we would attempt to talk with individuals who were satisfied, productive, and articulate collaborative writers…” In chapter 9, they state that when they began the project they thought they could “sum up [their] findings and offer a conceptual model for collaborative writing” (135). So this failed, and they revised their methods again, and start dropping words like “phallocentric” (indeed, the first time this happened on page 136, I had no context from their writing to draw from. It makes sense in the theories of post-colonialism and Native American research, but nothing in the text prepared me for this rather sudden phallus-dropping). The authors do develop this so-called mode of feminism in their description of dialogic modes of collaboration, but make some claims that I do not think are fully realized in the text, such as that the hierarchical mode of writing is “most often…a masculine mode of discourse” (138). Is this because the writers they surveyed previously were male? Because their IMRAD isn’t totally an IMRAD? Because of reception of their previous work? In the end, I am not sure. On their end, Lundsford and Ede seem to side with John Trimbur, who incidentally writes a textbook many of us use in teaching Business and Professional Writing here at NDSU. The authors cite Trimbur as saying that “it would be fatuous…to presume that collaborative learning can constitute more than momentarily an alternative to the present asymmetrical relations of power and distribution of knowledge and its means of production” (141).

1. How compelling do you find their argument so far? Are Lundsford and Ede allowed to just cite the “phallocentric” nature of strict hierarchical models and then present their research as a narrative that offers conclusive proof?
2.If you believe their argument is sound, what implications does that have for us in the classroom, especially in the rubric-making practice?