{"id":1038,"date":"2025-02-28T20:02:47","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T20:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esreid.com\/rethink\/?p=1038"},"modified":"2025-03-01T23:24:17","modified_gmt":"2025-03-01T23:24:17","slug":"allatonceness-or-the-impossibility-of-chapter-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esreid.com\/rethink\/allatonceness-or-the-impossibility-of-chapter-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Allatonceness, Or, The Impossibility of Chapter 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Rethink where writing “starts”<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a third-generation college textbook author, but I couldn\u2019t figure out how to start writing one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, I could easily start composing pages and pages of ideas about how students could improve their writing: I have no end of advice I\u2019m happy to share about writing. But I couldn\u2019t figure out what should come at the start of the book. Where should writing students\u2014and their instructors\u2014begin?<\/strong> Or, since our students arrive in our classes already having begun, already bringing high-level communication skills and processes with them, where can we begin again<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am deeply at home with some of these conundrums. I am a child of writing-teacher parents who identified themselves as \u201ca radical outliner and a radical brainstormer<\/a>.\u201d I\u2019m also half of a \u201cread-more-in-order-to-write-better \/\/ write-more-in-order-to-read-better\u201d marriage, and so I frequently switch-hit in these spaces. I\u2019ve wandered into additional doubts over the years: does theory come before practice, or grow out of it? is narrative always easier to write than argument? do you really have to \u201clearn the rules before you can break them\u201d? is it ever ok to write your draft and then \u201cadd the sources back in\u201d? should writers never edit while they\u2019re drafting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ann Berthoff and \u201cAll-at-once-ness\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing scholar Ann Berthoff names this conundrum \u201callatonceness\u201d: \u201c[The writer\u2019s mind is] naming, inferring, referring, recognizing, remembering, marking time, wondering, wandering, envisaging, matching, discarding, checking, inventing: all at once, we are carrying out these acts of mind as we are writing something down\u2014or up\u2014making meaning in the process\u201d (The Sense of Learning<\/em>). I suspect this is true of many human processes: playing second violin, repairing a torn ACL, freeclimbing El Capitan, running a shareholders\u2019 meeting, competing in a WNBA championship game. But I know it best in writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing instructors often talk about recursivity, the idea that writers move back and forth among a set of tasks: inquiring, explaining, inferring, composing, reviewing, revising, realizing, editing. We tell students that they don\u2019t have to write their introductions first, but can start with any part of a draft. We acknowledge that there are many processes for writing, not just one pathway. But recursivity is easier on teachers and students than allatonceness, because it acknowledges distinct moves that are merely reordered, and so can be taught separately (\u201ctoday, we\u2019ll focus on steps for peer reviewing\u201d). If writing really happens all-at-once, we have a greater challenge: how do we acknowledge that messiness, so that we\u2019re telling writers the truth about how writers work, and yet support students who may need to practice moves one at a time, passing a ball today and shooting a basket tomorrow?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting down a writing-learning pathway<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only does writing itself happen all-at-once<\/em>, but writers need both knowledge<\/em> all-at-once and skills<\/em> all-at-once. So teachers and learners have tricky decisions to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many current writing textbooks start with a focus on skills, by taking up a type of communication project: Narration, perhaps, or Exposition. ask students to start learning about writing knowledge and skills together. This makes a kind of sense: When we engage writers rhetorically (\u201cGive an acquaintance directions to your house\u201d rather than \u201cWrite a process paragraph\u201d or \u201cwrite an imperative sentence\u201d), we keep the work of communication alive and human for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rethinking Your Writing<\/em> appears to take an alternate approach, with three opening chapters about threshold concepts, habits of mind, and general rhetorical principles of writing. If pressed, I would admit that I believe advanced writers are particularly ready to benefit from some quick introductions to what professionals know about writing and writing learning. But I never intended for a course to start with four weeks of students studying the theories: that\u2019s like sitting in the bleachers reading about swimming without ever getting your feet wet. Writers need to link practice and theory throughout their learning and composing experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the existence of \u201cChapter 1<\/a>\u201d in RYW is an illusion<\/em><\/strong>, as is all the other sequencing implied by the numbers and clusters I created to enable clear references for teachers and students.  RYW is designed specifically as an online resource and built to have a start anywhere, go anywhere<\/em> approach:<\/p>\n\n\n\n