Prior Knowledge

Composition is the subject of this class you are taking; it is its own academic field or discipline in English Studies, and it is often combined with the areas of rhetoric and literacy. You can think of the subject of composition as the study of writing. Those of us in the composition discourse community (stay tuned—you’ll learn this term next chapter) value writing not just as something that people do, but also something people study. Therefore, in this course you will not only be doing—you guessed it—a lot of writing, but you will also be studying writing by reading scholarly texts from the composition, rhetoric, and literacy discourse community, as well as by doing some of your own research about writing.

In studying student writers for their book Writing Across Contexts, Kathleen Blake Yancey et al. found that when students sit down to write they “actively make use of the prior knowledge and practice they do have” (104).

What do you think they mean by prior knowledge? Think of something you’re pretty good at now but it took you a long time to learn. Maybe you’re a pretty good softball or baseball pitcher now, but only after hours upon hours of pitching to brick walls. Or maybe you’re such a good guitar player now that you forgot your first instructor wouldn’t let you play any songs until you spent months doing finger technique drills.

Maybe you have seen or heard of the 1984 movie the Karate Kid. To begin training Daniel in karate, martial arts master Mr. Miyagi begins by assigning chores that require repetitive motions to include waxing a car (“wax on, wax off”) and painting a fence. In a clip from the film Mr. Miyagi shows Daniel how the moves from those chores directly transfer to particular moves in karate.

Now is when I’m supposed to say that writing works in the same way, but it doesn’t. Does this mean you can’t become better at writing? Not at all. Of course you can. Studying writing, however, is different from studying guitar or karate, for example. This has to do with the concept of skill transfer.

Transfer

You might associate the concept of transfer with transferring from one college to another, for example, but that’s not the type of transfer I’m referring to. When you see the word transfer in this book it means the idea of applying knowledge and skills from one writing assignment to another, across all the writing you do for your other classes and beyond. Inevitably you will draw on what you already know—prior knowledge—when writing in new contexts that you will encounter in college. The main goal of college composition is for you to learn and practice a whole lot about writing for college that you will use not only to succeed in your composition classes, but also to transfer your knowledge and skills to other classes and contexts for writing.

For student writers like you though, transfer of prior knowledge is not as simple and clean as it was for Daniel in the Karate Kid—it’s messy.

Transfer when it comes to writing is not easy or automatic, as Ellen C. Carillo discusses in her piece for the eBook Bad Ideas About Writing. Student writers need to conduct metacognition exercises (36), which means they need to think about what they are thinking and really concentrate on what they are doing and why as they write.

Furthermore, there isn’t only one way to write. Elizabeth Wardle opens her contribution for the same book “There is no such thing as writing in general” (30). She adds that research shows “that every new situation, audience, and purpose requires writers to learn to do and understand new possibilities and constraints for their writing” (30). This means that no one class or training or workshop can cover how to write everything always well. Writing well means committing to being a lifelong learner, striving for flexibility and versatility, in cycles of trying and then learning from failure.

Yancey et al. specifically state that when students compose they draw on prior knowledge of writing in the following three ways:

1) by drawing on both knowledge and practice and adding a limited number of new key concepts to this critical knowledge base, an unsuccessful use of prior knowledge we call assemblage;

2) by reworking and integrating prior knowledge and practice with new knowledge as they address new tasks, a more successful use of prior knowledge we call remix; and

3) by creating new knowledge and practices for themselves when they encounter what we call a setback or critical incident, which is a failed effort to address a new task that prompts critical ways of thinking about what writing is and how to do it. (104)

TRY THIS to understand prior knowledge. What do you think Yancey et al. mean by assemblage, remix, and setback or critical incident when it comes to students’ drawing on prior knowledge when writing in college? Can you think of examples when you have unsuccessfully used assemblage and/or successfully used remix when composing a writing assignment for school, work, or in any context? What do you think about the idea of failing in order to learn to write in various contexts?

Let’s begin by examining your prior writing and reading experiences because, if you haven’t already guessed, these personal literacy experiences—and the larger social, cultural, and language issues within which your experiences are subsumed—are prior knowledge that can affect your transfer knowledge and skills.