Blog Post (2/20)


                I echo much of what’s already been posted to the blog about Lape’s concept of holistic “toggling” – the HOC/LOC binary is a little too simplistic, and sometimes a discussion about word choice or grammar can prompt a discussion about organization and content (and vice-versa).

                Brice describes the Writing Center at UAF as a “contact zone,” a space of cultural exchange between graduate student tutors and Native undergraduate students. According to Brice, tutors are to “learn from” their Native students rather than teaching them, “across lines of culture and hierarchy” (171). This all sounds a bit idealistic to me considering that the subsequent paragraphs of Brice’s piece make it seem like the goal of the UAF Writing Center is to (politely) reshape Native students’ writing in accordance with Western writing standards. However, I appreciate that Brice tries to preserve as much of her students’ “voice” as she can. What do we lose as an intellectual community when academic writing is only allowed to be a certain way (argumentative)? What makes “our” way of understanding writing the “right” way? How can we better allow for / learn from cross-cultural rhetoric?  As many of us also teach rhetoric, I wonder how we can design assignments that might be more open to cultural variance in writing?

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