How writing influences and changes a society - Essay Example

ID: _____________ d: May-06-2009 How writing influences and changes a society This paper highlights upon the logical significance of writing influence upon society, by visualizing exactly what writing does to change any society and to what extent the writing influences our way of thinking. It is clear from advanced literature analysis that today writing has not been limited to the traditional forms of texts, rather it has gained in popularity as a major analytical method in social science research fields such as communications studies, sociology, and anthropology. Written literature analysis has already gained popularity because of practical applications in pedagogical assessment, composition and education. Whatever be the mode of application, the literature has however, focused on written language. Nonetheless, writing involves a number of critical social domains in which it is self-represented by institutions like schooling, scientific and disciplinary knowledge, cultural production in the arts, the everyday life of government and corporate institutions, the public spaces of news and the diverse worlds of electronic text on the World Wide Web (Bazerman & Prior, 2004, p. 1). Many literature analysts believe that while looking at only one dimension of writing interchanges, educational, institutional, professional, and social settings limits the potentiality of writing discourse and the means through which writing enters into the dynamic unfolding of situations and events. How and when writing started influencing us To understand various modes in which writing possess an influence on our minds, we need to explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements of specific cultural settings. Traditionally, writing has elucidated the motivation factor behind scriptures and text analysis, which for centuries have demonstrated human nature while examining the limitations of the meanings, humans predicted from writing. As earliest as writing within scriptural religions, we can see that religion was a start to influence people with written sacred texts. It was due to the writings that bestowed upon the then people, motivation to fit themselves into sophisticated culture and form a part of modernized society. The initial examples of writing influences were that from the meaning people could opt out of holy books such as the Bible, Talmud and Koran. Of course these sacred books while determining a precise culture of humanity, initiated to what we call today as 'philosophy' and other intellectual endeavors that later involved criticizing claims of opponents, which motivated analysis of texts to find flaws in reasoning, confusions, or other limitations. Sacred writings also evolved a sense of legal/illegal among the people for which written law became a matter of precedence, followed by written legal briefs which became important to determine what the law really said, what the loopholes were, how precedents could be used to argue one side or another, what the weaknesses and strengths were of opposing arguments. The power of writing has always attempted to make changes in a society and no doubt that it has remained successful in diverting its audience to acknowledge the power of pen. But in order to make desirable changes, it has not hesitated to present before the society a mirror, through which the audience has accepted their cultural loopholes and foremost weaknesses. Therefore it is said that a society is reflected in the literature, it is not the literature that reflects a society. However, many authors believe that literature predicts the hegemony and culture of society. One can see that cultural text anthologies of rhetoric have become histories, since they are primarily concerned with displaying a sense of order and continuity, and also because of the reason that such rhetorics displayed the time it wrote in the literature. It would be naive to consider anthologies as mere compilations of texts, without any desire to make sense of history, without any ideology behind them. Rather, they are selections guided by the structure of a master narrative that not only provides its own tools and instruments for the interpretation and production of texts, but also blocks other narratives from forming and emerging. Writing in this epoch invent societal experiences and reflect on their discourse communities, which modern students of rhetoric fully acquaint with the key classical concepts and follow the classical model of writing discourse. These manuals seem to have concluded that outside the classical model, there is no possibility for a coherent or effective production of discourse to take place, which means that today there has not been much left to write except for the research about what previously has been written. What is worth saying is that today we are presented with a much broader picture of the world that looms even larger as the field of rhetorical research expands to embrace a large variety of discourse communities that call for more and more discourses to visualize and help them seeking their own identity. This picture is further illustrated by technical sophistication and the role technology has played in the formulation of theories, by the periodization of knowledge, and by the multiplicity of voices striving to take part in the conversation (Ezzaher, 2003, p. 2). This picture is also elaborated by an infinite display of signs, concepts, and terms that grow out of an increasing number of theories reflecting different but all possible perspectives residing in our society. Clearly, the result is an overwhelming sense of instability that undermines our views of tradition as a pure and authentic body of knowledge, of history as a collection of facts occupying neutral grounds, and finally of culture as a construct with stable historical foundations. How writing depicts cultural change Michael Foucault structuralist contribution to writing, points out that discontinuity serves as an erosion from outside world which affects the inner result but in a timespan of few years, after which a culture sometimes ceases to think and begins to think other things in a new way (Ezzaher, 2003, p. 3). Habermas evaluates Foucault by stating that Foucault postulates writing as truth for all times and societies (Kiros, 1998, p. 22). In this perspective, by taking the classical model of writing as an absolute paradigm for rhetorical study, we are resisting possibilities of change in our views of the society in which we live. The modern social, political, and historical context has undergone various forms of erosion through the author's pen that frames reference to the world around us by considering it broader in today's epoch and includes various concerns to such an extent that the classical model, which limits the art of persuasion to deliberative, forensic, and epidermic discourses, becomes too narrow to encompass such complex and diverse modern cultural realities. But such cultural ethnography according to Chick (2000) has depicted writing as a catalyst to assess and even modify culture in terms of high-concordance codes that compose systemic cultural patterns to generate reliable data that matches up with cultural theory (Chick, 2000). With cultures arise the discursive self research as shaped in academic and nonacademic cultures. Academic cultures prove valuable to writers, their audiences, colleagues, managers and professional writing scholars to understand better the practices and structures undergirding composition of the self within workplace discourses. It is the power of writing that helps accomplishing workplace research, however, finding frameworks for interpretation that enable one to capture the often momentary, ambiguous, and even contradictory manifestations of subjectivity in the discourses encountered in academic and nonacademic settings. Writing in Academic and Nonacademic Settings It is often seen that writing in academic settings, influences as much as it carries influence in nonacademic settings. The reason is that academic writing evolves difficulty on a student or learner level that derives from the deficit models having framed interpretations of student writing for so many years, because for decades academic essays have been approached as demonstrations of incomplete proficiency to be corrected (Henry, 2000, p. 18). Therefore it proves difficult for a learner to present in his readings a subjectivity that goes beyond that of professionalism or pictures the true culture. Freudian psychological theory addresses this difficulty in composition epistemology positing a fundamentally unified self that helps new and inexperienced writers to express their views. Whereas such writing epistemology often helps teachers and students as writers within academic discourses to distant themselves for a while from society and thwart interpretations that enable student writers to perceive the many subjectivities they assumed with each new writing as influential one. But in this case, writers too, are unable to present themselves in writings without society and somehow relates their academic assessment directly or indirectly with this society. Workplace writing is driven by motivation In nonacademic settings, writing takes the form of 'researching the discursive self' in the context of organization, that obviously form as part of the cultural pattern we are succumb to. Workplace writing lacks initiative that stems from broadly held views of instrumental writing and is considered as 'authorless' for it smacks purely personal issues that most workplaces would pass over in favor of research on topics perceived as more pragmatic. Writing in workplace cultures provoke an endeavor that enriches rationales for research on nonacademic writing by linking these rationales to archeology. Writing speaks itself for the discursive features of workplace cultures to embrace an array of understandings. When utilized in context with any linguistic unit beyond the sentence, a paragraph or series of paragraphs forms a unit, or full text which when refers to language use is determined by the conventions of a particular community or socialized group in composition literature. According to Henry (2000) "Post structural and postmodern theories of discourse would define writing as a way of thinking (knowing and talking) about the world, inherently ideological and positing language not as a vehicle to describe a preexisting reality but as the material out of which thought and reality are constructed" (Henry, 2000, p. 91). Writing Intervening in Cultural Processes Depending upon the culture and positions that are offered, writing possesses the power to engage little more into cultures than putting up with limiting notions of identity until one can move to a better culture. Writing decides cultural fate and future scenarios of cultural destiny. Cultures therefore, undoubtedly resist revision from the bottom up, certainly from one lone agent whose professional class carries no particular target, which spurs academics who prepare such agents for their positions to investigate other means of intervention in local cultures and in cultural processes. Many authors believe that any intervention in cultural processes beyond the walls of the academy may strike compositionists as foreign, but in professional writing scholarship to address influencing workplace practices. Such influence is possible through curriculum design and research which requires professional writing scholarship to be the field to forward 'influential' mandate that derives not only from its object of study but from the methodologies that have most informed this study. From the earliest ventures into workplace cultures by academics in rhetoric and composition, the primary fieldwork methodology of workplace writing has been ethnography and at least two approaches to ethnographic inquiry, applied ethnography and feminist ethnography, lobby explicitly for intervention in the culture under study. Applied Anthropology is mainly characterized by intervention which after observing the process that interpretive anthropology especially focuses, it follows the principle that to characterize people in any way is to intervene in their lives (Henry, 2000, p. 163). This has remained a principle at the heart of feminist anthropology in feminist culture which seeks professional writers to innovate new methodologies with respect to sensing the current recognition in cultural processes as part of our work. A little broader spectrum of cultural intervention escorts us to reach the landscape of postsecondary curriculum design. Henry (2000) mentions Bourdieu in this respect and states that, to speak of cultural processes in terms of cultural production and reproduction is to invoke the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, who in terms of culture and society suggests ways to produce cultural arbitrary capable of perpetuating itself after pedagogical action is ceased (ibid). Writing enhances cultural settings when some cultures highly value acquisition and so tend simply to expose children to adults modeling some activity and eventually the child picks it up, picks it up as a pattern, rather than as a series of analytic bits. It reflects culture when cultural groups highly value teaching and thus break down what is to be mastered into sequential steps and analytic parts and engage in explicit explanation (Zamel & Spack, 1998, p. 54). It is culture that has contributed towards reshaping and has allowed our younger generation to write freely, such freedom has been portrayed in current writing to the extent that it has allowed electronic writing to become a significant part of our society. Electronic writing - our cultural reflection Our society has encouraged the use of e-writing over traditional discourse which, no doubt has increased trespass of computers upon the territory of the book by raising fears among book lovers, but has also opened up new possibilities for the enrichment of books and writing. Now writing has its cultural significance in electronic newspapers, magazines, and a flowering of amateur publishing ventures on the Web. Writing according to Trinkle (1998) "has not been the sole means humans have devised to represent the spatial simultaneity of reality and, by extension, record past events" (Trinkle, 1998, p. 7). With e-writing the concept of active learning has emerged which serves non-traditional education and research practices. In many respects, e-writing can be implemented quite well and even it has provided more versatility and diversification in making our cultural values legible. Apart from the electronic culture, such kind of learning is particularly suited to academic learners or inexperienced writers when they make use of hypertext that requires the learner to be actively involved in his or her own learning, since it requires a constant series of choices about one's next step for learning. Words and writing, many enthusiasts believe will continue to be valued, because the conceptual space of the computer is a cognitive survival of the fittest where writing and the cognitive features therein begin to appear slow and cumbersome when placed next to sound, image, and movement (ibid). Writing helps in maintaining the writers perfection to value authority because anyone with the ability to read can appeal to the text. The text can allow for judgment by others, including those of other times and places and because of this ability for the reader to distance himself from the message in the text, the written culture promotes abstract thought, and it does so in a broad and contentious fashion. Of course, there are drawbacks and losses, just as writing alone does not retain all the advantages of culture, especially in giving a sense of society. With learning based on e-writing, writing could consider those aspects of objectivity and length of study, which are presumed in written culture, and are not a part of a new demonstration of learning. By allowing each of us to play our role as student, scholar and author, we welcome a a dis-intermediation of our educational culture that requires more efforts to initiate another change with the potential to alter the very nature of our culture more radically than any other shift in information distribution and retrieval for centuries. References Bazerman Charles & Prior Paul, (2004) What Writing Does and How It Does It: An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. Chick Garry (2000) 'Writing Culture Reliably: The Analysis of High-Concordance Codes', Ethnology. Vol: 39. No. 4. pp. 365. Ezzaher E. Lahcen, (2003) Writing and Cultural Influence: Studies in Rhetorical History, Orientalist Discourse, and Post-Colonial Criticism: Peter Lang: New York. Henry Jim, (2000) Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archeology of Professional Writing: Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, IL. Kiros Teodros, (1998) Self-Construction and the Formation of Human Values: Truth, Language, and Desire: Greenwood Press: Westport, CT. Trinkle A. Dennis, (1998) Writing, Teaching, and Researching History in the Electronic Age: Historians and Computers: M. E. Sharpe: Armonk, NY. Zamel Vivian & Spack Ruth, (1998) Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning across Languages and Cultures: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. Read More