assignment

The poet Charles Boebel once explained his view of personal writing: “There are many masks buried deep inside each of us and when we write, these masks, sometimes one, sometimes more than one, surface and are expressed in our written works” (ICEA 2002). Masks provide interchangeable alternate identities, not to be hidden behind, but exposed, processed and developed through writing. Boebel’s concept draws upon connections from the mask theory of W.B. Yeats to the expressivism of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie, to the psychoanalytic theory of Christine Brooke-Rose.

The interesting writer, the informative speaker, the accurate thinker, and the sane individual operate on all levels of the abstraction ladder, moving quickly and gracefully and in orderly fashion from higher to lower, from lower to higher, with minds as lithe and deft and beautiful as monkeys in a tree.

—S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (1991)

Introduction

That the "teacher-writer" exists or "teacher-modeling" works is familiar to readers of professional literature in composition studies. Parallel to the field's interest in the writing context during the entire 1980s, philosophical and theoretical discussions of positioning have also popularized the term "student-writers," which, together with "teacher-writers," were eclectically used and generally understood as participants of writing workshops.

Population

College composition students who are studying argumentation principles and persuasive writing.

Rationale

None of our students is likely to write in the passive voice quite as dramatically as acclaimed French Author Raymond Queneau in his Exercises in Style (1981). In this text, he wrote poetic versions of a conflict between two men on a bus in France, including this passive selection:

Few contemporary scientific texts are written in the dialogue form used by earlier scientists such as Newton, Galileo and Boyle; additionally, the extended form of dialogue that exists in professional journals is usually not visible to the novice student. Therefore, students often are not actively engaged in the language and rhetoric of science. As Jay Lemke points out in his book Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values: “Talking science is not the totality of doing science.