Forming and Meaning: Writing the Counterpoint Essay.
Although many composition teachers talk about the need to find "or ganic" forms in composing, students are often content to organize their writing in formulaic ways, frequently resorting to the five-paragraph theme?an introduction followed by three or four supporting points and a summary conclusion. Most students have internalized this form to such a degree that it has become the "default drive" for expository writing. When teachers ignore the form that student writing will take, they are not necessarily allowing students to produce organic structures but are generally encourag ing conformity to standard patterns of exposition. Much of our resistance to discussing form with students comes from a romantic view of composition that posits form as a product of inspiration and suggests that specifying a form for composition, therefore, inevitably limits a writer's individual genius. In other words, form is often associated with conformity?, with rigid rules and "boiler plate" prose. However, as students become aware of different options for organizing discourse, they are not simply learning alternative methods of arrangement; they are learning new ways of thinking about their subject. A growing recognition that form serves a generative purpose in writing, that it liberates rather than limits many student writers, is evident in the scholarship of such writers as Chris Anderson, Richard Coe, Frank D'Angelo, Keith Fort, and Ross Winterowd. Further, Ann Berthoff argues that form is the creative force behind composition:
Teaching Students What Not to Say: Iser, Didion, and the Rhetoric of Gaps.
We all teach our freshmen that coherent writing depends on the use of transitional words and obvious signposts of structure to signal the relationships and sequences of ideas. At the freshman level, we necessarily teach explicitness and transition. Using the literary theory of Wolfgang Iser and the nonfiction of Joan Didion, I want to consider a paradox about coherence that experienced writers soon discover: powerful writing often depends on the deliberate omission of signposts and commentary; meaning sometimes carries across the gaps or silences in a discourse with greater power than words them selves can bear. This is not a new idea, either in rhetorical theory or in pedagogy. My purpose, however, is both to propose a somewhat different theoretical approach to the concept of implicitness and to make some practical suggestions for teaching implicitness to our students. I will begin with a quick sketch of Iser's theory, apply the theory to Didion's strikingly stark style, and then discuss how to apply this theory in the advanced composition class.1 My focus throughout will be restricted to what Ronald Weber has called "literary nonfiction": informative and reflective writing, primarily narrative and dramatic in mode, in which the language has an intrinsic literary interest. Iser's notion of implicitness, I will argue, is one way of explaining this "literary" quality. Furthermore, my recommendations for teaching will be limited to advanced composition. In my view, the rhetoric of gaps should be taught only after conventional instruction in cohesion and only as a means of supplementing traditional notions of how sentences and paragraphs fit together. The rhetoric of gaps gives us a vocabulary for teaching the kind of creative, exploratory, open-ended nonfiction that we want our students to try once they have mastered the basics of form, structure, and coherence.
The Propensity of Community College Chief Academy Officers to Leave an Institution
The study described in this report was designed to measure the propensity of community college chief academic officers (CAOs) to leave their current position and college, the levels of satisfaction they feel with their jobs, and their perceptions of role conflict and ambiguity. For the purposes of this study, a chief academic officer (CAO) is defined as the administrative head with responsibility for all academic affairs at the institution. At most community colleges the chief academic officer is the second highest-ranking administrative officer and reports to the president. Although there are numerous titles in use, the most common titles used by community colleges for the chief academic officer include academic dean, academic vice-president, vice-president for instruction, instructional dean, dean of the college, . . . . In addition, community colleges often use the title "provost" to designate the head of a campus in multi-campus or multi-college operations; in many cases, the provost also serves as the chief academic officer for the campus. Definitions aside, however, each institution recognizes its chief academic officer as the person responsible for the institution's academic programs, the academic leader who works directly with the faculty. (Vaughan, 1990, p. 6) Recently the executive vice president has become an increasingly popular title for those performing the duties of the CAO at community colleges. Despite the nearly universal existence of job descriptions for this position at community colleges, the responsibilities of the chief academic officer are often ill-defined (Wolverton, Wolverton, & Gmelch, 1999). Vaughan (1990) notes that researchers have documented from 48 to 168 separate duties for CAOs at community colleges. Although not all duties carry the same degree of urgency, the CAO is accountable for performing or supervising the performance of all of them. Because CAOs are the direct link between the administration and faculty, they may have a greater effect on the internal affairs of an institution than even the president (Birnbaum, 1992; Mech, 1997; Vaughan, 1990). Despite its potential for effectiveness, this position often means being caught between the administration and the faculty, which is a significant source of role conflict and role ambiguity for CAOs. Role conflict occurs when individuals find it necessary to handle duties that appear to be inconsistent or in conflict with their self-perception of their role or roles within the organizational structure. For example, for CAOs this might occur when (in their administrative role) they have to carry out a personnel action having a negative effect on a faculty member who (in their faculty leader role) they consider a colleague. Role ambiguity, on the other hand, occurs when a CAO is uncertain about the functional boundaries of his or her organizational role. For example, a CAO who believes he or she needs to seek higher-level approval for what to others is a routine decision may be experiencing role ambiguity. Suppose, for example, a CAO believes that a faculty member's willingness to develop an Internet-based course justifies reducing or redistributing his or his workload. If the CAO is uncertain, about whether he or she needs to seek presidential approval before offering the faculty member a reduced load this would be role ambiguity. Several researchers who have focused on institutions of higher education have concluded that there is a direct connection between job satisfaction and stress resulting from role conflict or role ambiguity (McBride, Munday, & Tunnell, 1992; Milosheff, 1990; Simpson, 1984). Researchers have also established that job dissatisfaction and voluntary job turnover are strongly correlated (Cano & Miller, 1992; Glick, 1992; McBride, Munday, & Tunnell, 1992). Job satisfaction represents the individual workers subjective evaluation of the degree to which his or her requirements are met by the work environment. …