Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [79]
Volunteers take turns reading all or part of their freewrites aloud to the group without comment. It is essential that people read rather than describe or summarize what they wrote. As each person reads, listeners should jot down words and phrases that catch their attention.
Listeners call out what they heard in the freewrite by responding to the question, “What did you hear?”
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SITUATE THE READING RHETORICALLY: FIND THE PITCH, THE COMPLAINT, AND THE MOMENT
There is no such thing as “just information.” Virtually all readings possess what speech-act theorists call “illocutionary force”—the goal of an utterance. Everything you read, to varying degrees, is aware of you, the audience, and is dealing with you in some way.
One of the most productive ways of analyzing a reading is to consider the frame within which a piece is presented: who its intended audience is, what it seeks to persuade that audience about, and how the writer presents himself or herself to appeal to that audience. Readings virtually never treat these questions explicitly, and thus, it is a valuable analytical move to infer a reading’s assumptions about audience (see the short take, Rhetoric: What It Is and Why You Need It, in Chapter 1).
An element of situating a reading rhetorically is to locate what it seeks to accomplish and what it is set against at a given moment in time. We address these concerns as a quest to find what we call the pitch, the complaint, and the moment:
the pitch, what the piece wishes you to believe;
the complaint, what the piece is reacting to or worried about; and
the moment, the historical and cultural context within which the piece is operating.
Here’s a bit more on each.
The pitch: A reading is an argument, a presentation of information that makes a case of some sort, even if the argument is not explicitly stated. Look for language that reveals the position or positions the piece seems interested in having you adopt.
The complaint: A reading is a reaction to some situation, some set of circumstances, that the piece has set out to address, even though the writer may not say so openly. An indispensable means of understanding someone else’s writing is to figure out what seems to have caused the person to write the piece in the first place. Writers write, presumably, because they think something needs to be addressed. What is that something? Look for language in the piece that reveals the writer’s starting point. If you can find the position or situation he or she is worried about and possibly trying to correct, you will more easily locate the pitch, the position the piece asks you to accept.
The moment: A reading is a response to the world conditioned by the writer’s particular moment in time. In your attempt to figure out not only what a piece says but where it is coming from (the causes of its having been written in the first place and the positions it works to establish), history is significant. When was the piece written? Where? What else was going on at the time that might have shaped the writer’s ideas and attitudes?
The Pitch, the Complaint, and the Moment: Two Brief Examples
Here are two examples of student writing in response to the request that they locate the pitch, the complaint, and the moment for a famous essay in the field of Composition and Rhetoric, “Inventing the University” by David Bartholomae.
Bartholomae’s complaint seems to center around the idea that writing is typically taught at a grammatical, not intellectual level. ‘Basic’ writers are identified by their sentence level compositional errors, not by the content of their ideas or ability to present a complex argument. Bartholomae argues that students must be drawn into the language and mindset of academia before they have the authority to confidently expand upon more complicated ideas. Students are expected to fluently participate