Honorable Mentions: Essays that Didn't Make the CRP but Are Still Worth the Nod

In preparing for the Curated Readings Projects, there were some essays that fit the parameters of “story,” but were not included in the final presentation. There were yet others that did not directly correlate to the “story” motif, but had valuable insight to offer. This is a nod to the essays that didn’t make the cut, but did make an impression.

“Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory Pedagogy”

As seen in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, page 89

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford are able to capture an interesting concept of defining audience in their 1984 essay originally published in college Composition and Communication. Descriptively labeled audience addressed and audience invoked, Ede and Lunsford say of the latter, "the central task of the writer, then, is not to analyze an audience and adapt discourse to meet its needs. Rather, the writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader--cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text" (2011, p. 83). 

The two ideations around what an audience is are situated along a continuum, as shown in the graphic above (taken directly from the article) and include the literal, physical audience, the intended audience, and the eventual audience, all of whom the writer must keep in mind as they carefully consider how theme and style affect the delivery of a given topic or idea. I found this concept interesting, but ultimately decided against it because it felt more like "lore" or "niche" than "story." Still a good read.

"A Discourse-Centered Rhetoric of the Paragraph"

Taken from 1866 edition of English Composition and Rhetoric

Paul Rodgers' 1966 Essay takes an extremely rigid view on his road less traveled through the construction of the paragraph. His logic is founded in Alexander Bain's 1866 work around and engendering of"six 'rules'" of the paragraph. Rodgers takes the reader through the history and evolution of the paragraph from its literal Greek meaning as a "punctuation device," or symbol symbol used to denote a "break in the flow of discourse" (p. 178), to its current understanding as an "'expanded sentence'--logically, structurally, semantically" (p. 175). This idea of paragraph analysis, structure, tone, and rhythm all lend themselves to heuristics, especially when Rodgers says, "paragraphs are not composed, they are discovered" (p. 180).

This essay plays nicely within the concept of narratology, which was of one of the guiding principles I used when selecting essays for the project. I actually chose this essay, but for space considerations only was only able to keep five and unfortunately, this one didn't make the cut. With all of its rules and the close consideration it begs, Rodgers sheds light on an often taken for granted aspect of writing, and resituates the paragraph as an important meta-textual tool he deems a stadia of discourse.