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in specific detail): This example of a memo’s format, including the headings and paragraph layout, may help you as you undertake the assignment for COMM class.
3) Division. Distinguishes between and among alternatives, accompanying each with a reason and/or possible consequence: My boss is not very good at dealing with people: he either doesn’t communicate at all, or he communicates poorly. Both situations prevent the employees from doing their jobs well, and the employees eventually become frustrated.
4) Accumulation. Gathers up details that had been discussed previously: Clearly, poor communication at work can lead to these additional problems: misunderstandings between co-workers, frustration with the job, and even the production of faulty—or even dangerous—products.
5) Antithesis. Sets ideas in opposition to each other: You may not have enough experience to understand the problems caused by poor communication, but my twenty years on the job has shown me the vast array of difficult work situations that are only made even worse with poor communication.
6) Comparison. Draws out similarities between two dissimilar things or concepts (an analogy):
Just as music requires attention to the notes used and the order in which they are played, writing well in a professional setting requires attention to the words used and the order in which they are presented.
7) Exemplum. Cites a quote or an action of an authority figure: John Smith, expert in business management, asserted during employee orientation that “a clear, well organized procedural manual contributes to an efficient work environment.”
8) Portrayal. Provides a depiction or portrayal of relevant physical and/or visual characteristics: While Mr. Smith spoke, his voiced wavered and he couldn’t stop shaking: his glasses bounced around on his nose and his unruly white hair stood up in all directions.
9) Conciseness. Compresses a point into the least number of words necessary (can be a brief summary of what you’ve already stated): Thus, while Mr. Smith’s presentation was informative, his demeanor and appearance made him less credible to his listeners.
Figure 2. Assignment Handout
The boxes contain concepts, while the lines and arrows indicate the conceptual links between those concepts. These units of boxes and arrows constitute propositions, which are “statements about some object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed … containing two or more concepts connected using linking words or phrases to form a meaningful statement” (Novak & Cañas, 2008, p. 1). The concept map, like Fauconnier’s notion of “analogical counterfactuals,” illustrates how important a place comparison holds in the learning process of the human mind, as the act of placing one idea or concept next to another invites the mind to establish relationships between those two things. This is precisely how transitions work: two phrases, sentences, or paragraphs are placed in sequence, and the reader’s first thought is “How do these two things connect to each other?”
Indeed, from the audience’s perspective, transitions provide coherence for the message of any given piece of writing, providing for us, in effect, the steps comprising the conceptual journey on which the writer wishes us to accompany her. For the reader, in fact, transitions constitute a window into the mind of the writer; for the writer, they function not only as a manner of indicating purpose to the audience, but they also appear at the moments at which she is cognitively able to see her own reasoning in a reflexive manner. The fact that this is the point at which her line of reasoning becomes clearest to her—and that awareness intersects with her awareness of the cues required by her projected audience—possibly explains why so many of the students I have spoken to have such a difficult time with transitions. This difficulty is also explainable in terms of creativity in both the reader’s and writer’s minds. As Fauconnier states, “To communicate is to trigger dynamic creative processes in other minds and in our own … mappings can be entrenched (as in conventional metaphor and established grammatical constructions), but … also operate on-line to yield novel meanings, construals and interpretations” (1997, p. 182).
It is this potential for “novel meaning” that connects the medieval emphasis on prose composition to modern pedagogy—in the form of process theory and post-process theory—and further reinforces the pedagogical potential of style. Much of process theory revolves around the notion of “writing process,” which, in composition textbooks, moves through the first three rhetorical canons—invention, organization, and style. Still, it is much more complicated than that: the recursive nature of writing is apparent in that a writer can have an idea (invention) and begin to organize it, only to find that the act of organizing it has changed the underlying focus somewhat—leading the author back into revision.
Recursivity also has a place within with post-process composition theory, which moves beyond process theory by emphasizing how context-dependent every writing act actually is. As George Pullman suggests, “… the process of writing is not context invariant. The genre, the circumstances, the subject, and the whole dynamic of the rhetorical situation influence what process will lead to what document” (1999, p. 26). In this formulation, the act of writing cannot be distilled into steps, which is precisely what process theory does. In a sense, post-process theory recognizes how changeable a piece of writing can be when one considers the various forces that come into play to initiate and carry out any writing act, forces that change substantively over time. In fact, for the post-process theoretician, revision is something that, when necessary, is just as likely initiated by forces external to the writer as by the writer’s own impulse to do so. Indeed, revision may ultimately be even more important for the post-process theoretician because, if the context is ever-changing, that situation would require revision as the context changes—even if revision means revising one’s needs in terms of genre and message.
When any type of revision occurs, however, recursivity plays a significant role, especially for more experienced writers. As Nancy Sommers suggests, novice writers tend to revise by focusing on change at the lexical level, while experienced writers revise in a way that “confuses the beginning and end, the agent and vehicle; it confuses, in order to find, the line of argument” (Sommers, 1988, p. 125). To put it more directly, more experienced writers revise as they compose. Cognitively, of course, when this happens, the writer is forging links between existing material in her mind while creating new links—conceptual transitions at the cognitive level, as it were, many of which will appear in the written text in the form of linguistic transitions.
Vinsauf’s treatises illuminate the potential pedagogical and psychological importance of these linguistic transitions not only as a topical focus for composition teaching, but also as a method. In fact, both the Documentum and the Poetria discuss the figures while they embody the very precepts they describe, making them function both as instructional tools and illustrative meta-rhetorics. Thus, while the Documentum includes a discussion of transitions, it also uses transitions within the description itself. If we consider the fact that Vinsauf’s treatises are intended for teaching purposes, we can extrapolate another lesson from them—one which can be incorporated into a pedagogical approach: the classroom experience as a meta-rhetorical construct.
Indeed, this notion of meta-rhetoric can inform classroom pedagogy on many levels, bringing together stylistic imitation, transitions, and the writing process. In order to do so, it is clearly necessary to combine the imitation of figures, which may involve a variety of levels—phrases, sentences, brief passages—with transitions, and do so within the student’s rhetorical purpose (e.g., on specific class assignments). Instead of the instructor making corrective comments in the margin to indicate where improvement is needed, this kind of pedagogy would enable students to strengthen the building blocks of discourse—and to do so in a way that emphasizes invention. In other words, this type of approach would allow the student to build a repertoire of cognitive structures and rhetorical strategies while simultaneously requiring her to build and articulate conceptual linkages between juxtaposed linguistic units—between phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and larger passages. At the level of assignments and class activities, the emphasis would be on imitation of small discursive units—figures as outlined in Vinsauf’s Documentum.
In order to determine a strategy for building such a pedagogy, I gave a brief informal assignment to my Business Communication