All the Frameworks!: A Demonstration of How I'm Really Terrible at Making Choices
Lyons' historical view of ordinary writing makes compelling arguments about the ways that individuals and groups use writing to (re)compose identities and social relations across vast physical (and mental and emotional) distances. Lillis identifies more specific areas of everyday writing: 1) organizing, personal communication, private leisure, documenting life, sense making, and social participation. She also provides us with useful definitions (practice, event, domain of activity) and tools for researching everyday writing, while cautioning us against taking up these terms and tools without recognizing the potential limitations of categories. Hauser and McClellan (H&M) focus on the importance of vernacular rhetorics for social movements, explaining that it is in the space between the official and mundane "where the established and marginalized vie for power" (29). Similarly, Rivers and Weber (R&W) outline the mundane in relation to publics and enactments of change, explaining that "most changes proposed by advocates occur through concrete modifications to institutional structures of government offices, courts, schools, corporations, and religious and community organizations" (188). They explicitly draw on the ecology metaphor when they write, "Rhetorical exchange is a bloody mess, a living thing, or, more accurately, a confluence of many living things: an ecology" (193).
Ackerman's framework differs from those discussed so far in that he adds the spatial dimension to rhetorical situation, explaining that rhetorical agency produces and maintains social space. Like Lillis, he discusses "sites" as being technically and conceptually constructed, and he also emphasizes the importance of "spaces between." He writes that it is in the "middle place" (between representations of space and representational space) "where most people lead their lives" (113). Finally, Barton and Papen seem to encapsulate all of these frameworks in outlining their anthropology of writing and discussing the anglophone and francophone areas of research that contribute to their definition. What I appreciate about all of these articles is their focus on everyday writing as crucial to just about everything we do. Publics are formed and maintained through the circulation of texts (R&W, H&M), as are institutions (R&W), social movements (H&M), and social spaces (Ackerman). Likewise, individuals (re)compose identities through literacy practices as they move between social spaces, navigate institutions, participate in counter/publics, and effect change.
reasons: 1) She provides clear definitions that can anchor our understanding and discussion of everyday writing, 2) She also introduces tools that can be used in analysis/research, and 3) She reminds us that we cannot stop with these definitions and tools, as any category limits what we are able to see/understand. Barton and Papen provide the most capacious framework, I think, but this framework is limited insofar as they discuss only historical and ethnographic approaches to everyday writing; Lillis's framework is much more specific.
Like Joe, I appreciate the pedagogical application of R&W's framework, and I found myself agreeing with much of their argument. As I was reading, I was reminded of the first course that I took as a graduate student--"Rhetorical Production of the Everyday." For our final project, we were to complete an institutional critique (outlined by Porter et al.). When the project was introduced to us, we were all baffled and pretty terrified. We had no idea how we would carry out an institutional critique, and though our professor conferenced with us and had us work in groups to plan our critiques, the project never really seemed to gel. Reading R&W's work gave me a sense of why this project might have gone awry (not that I didn't learn a lot from it; I did. But I did not succeed in changing library borrowing policies for undergraduate students, as had been my intention). I did interviews, I read and analyzed years of policy manuals, and I developed a lovely framework using Giddens, Bourdieu, Dorothy Smith, etc. What I did not do, and what R&W emphasize in their article, is work to generate a public through the production and circulation of texts. I did try to go it alone because I didn't know any better. All of this is to say that from a pedagogical perspective, I believe R&W (probably alongside H&M) offer the most compelling framework.
Each of these frameworks has contributed a piece to my understanding of everyday writing. However, if I had to choose one that seemed most effective for the analysis/research of everyday writing, I would probably go with Lillis, for several
