Writing can be organized around 3 different basic structures:
- Thesis-- This is what I want to say
- Argument-- This is what I want you to believe or do
- Controlling Purpose-- This is what I want to do/accomplish in my writing
These three ways of organizing an essay are very different from one another. The last one, controlling purpose, is the one that is emphasized in this class.
If you assume that what you are reading was written with a "thesis" you will be asking yourself "what is this person trying to say? What is their overall point?" And many of you might be frustrated reading, say, Rickert, because he has many points, and none of them seems to be an "overall" point. You can't reduce him neatly to a single sentence that explains "what he is trying to say." That's because Rickert was not writing with a thesis.
This is also true of arguments-- arguments are basically a thesis with an extra component, a "reason" which justifies the thesis, and then becomes the basis for "convincing" or persuading the reader that the thesis is valid. So if you are reading with this in mind, you might be asking "what does this reader want me to think/do?" This kind of writing often employs "evidence" in order to "support" a position. But this mode of writing entails only one argument, with that whole essay being structured around that argument. But our three texts seem to make multiple arguments. So clearly that doesn't really apply either.
A "controlling purpose" is a purpose, or a statement of what an author is trying to do with their writing. Rickert is trying to identify the depth of a problem (with teaching writing to college students) and then to create different ways of thinking about that problem in order to get a sense of how teachers should respond to or deal with that problem. He doesn't have a "piont"-- but rather he's trying to do some "work" here-- to accomplish something, an exploration that provides new ideas, new ways of thinking about teaching that might make a student's experience in a writing class a little bit better.
Reading a text, while assuming, for example, that it was written with a "thesis" when it was actually written with a controlling purpose can lead to confusion-- it can lead to the claim: "Rickert is all over the place, he jumps from one thing to another and I can't figure out what he's trying to say. I think he's a bad writer." (I've actually had students say things like this before . . . ). But this response is based on the assumption that Rickert was just trying to "say" one thing-- in other words, the student assumed Rickert had a thesis, when in reality he had a controlling purpose.
As you read, it is helpful to ask the question "what is the author *doing* here"-- doing in this paragraph, doing with this concept or idea, doing in the essay overall-- and use this to counter your deeply ingrained habit of always asking "what are they trying to say?". Remember-- sometimes they aren't trying to *say* anything, but rather are trying to *do* other things, like "explore" or "analyze" or "interpret" or "critique." There are a lot of things we can do in writing other than "saying" something!
So how were *you* reading these texts? What assumptions did you make about how these texts were written? How did that affect your understanding of the text?
-Adam
