Privilege, Negotiation, and Manipulation

Mortensen places writing and conversation about writing the proper place-audience, readers,reasons, and rules. I particularly enjoyed the discussion about "overt authority" and "covert forms of authority" mentioned on page 110. The tripartite cycle of initiated, responded to, and evaluation of writing and conversing becomes important for clarifying ideas. Again there is reference to our old buddy, Vygostsky when Bleich alludes to the need of clarification of the words as "contributing one's words to a conversation [as]an interpersonal act that counts"(119). All the work in this chapter addresses not only the reason for the writing but the apparent need of the writer to further elaborate or explain the written word with the spoken word. I am reminded of Brodkey's "The Literature Letters" where the placement of the teacher might seem more privileged.Yet, when we had discussion in class there appeared to be a division between worlds. Mortensen attempts to show how the privilege of the academia might be avoided but he acknowledges that other discourse communities have not been fully entered into the mix of writing and reading. Maybe the talking about the writing offers a chance to avoid a value judgement of the worth of writing by placing writing and conversing in the real world. Much of this chapter appears to prove how words written and spoken might change meaning within different contexts.

Then we move to Lauer and Asher's chapter on "True Experiments" and the active manipulation of subject and task. I would like to discuss the issues of "randomization" further. One of the problems I have found with "true experiments" is how the subjects might be adversely affected by any study. Sometimes I have seen how human errors or human neglect can affect the errors that are "due to chance" or are "undetected". The internal validity of a study in a true experiment sometimes tries to acknowledge or make adjustment to the results that will not compromise the results. Even in a true experiment there does seem to be a problem with the manipulation of the natural environment. I think that gets back to the importance of adding descriptive work to the presentation of the results of experiments. What does anyone think about having the random control groups and groups affected by the study? What would be the justification for short term results when addressing issues of education? How would positive results be "caught up" or negative results be "rectified" for the student? These are just some philosophical points I sometimes ponder.