Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
The Art and Craft of Sentence-Level Choices
Michelle Cohen
The Medical University of South Carolina
cohenmi@musc.edu
When I was in graduate school, I had the good fortune of finding a home for my studio art practice in the university’s ceramics facilities. I worked on my sculptures in a space primarily dedicated to advanced undergraduate ceramics students, and I joined in their critiques.
A sensitive issue that would often arise was the tension between art and craft. Ceramicists have to think seriously about this binary because we work in what is often called a “craft medium.” In the art world, that often means justifying one’s own legitimacy. One student devoted his work to upsetting the art-craft distinction, intentionally breaking his mugs or covering them in sharp spikes. In critique, he would ask, “If I take away function, then is it art?” Another student painstakingly carved her vessels with mandala patterns. In critiques, she bristled when her peers tried to navigate delicately around the word craft: “Why would I be offended? I’m a craftsperson. That doesn’t mean I’m not an artist.”
I watched as these students questioned a familiar hierarchy in the art world—one where skill and function are seen as values of a mere hired hand, whereas the illustrious concept occupies the mind of a “true artist.” At the same time, I found these art-craft debates paralleling issues I encountered in my work as a compositionist, particularly in the writing center.
LOCS as craft
In the writing center, the division between hand and mind, between form and content, was mirrored in the distinction between higher order concerns (HOCs)¹ and lower order (or “later order”) concerns (LOCs).² When working with a client, I had been trained to prioritize “HOCs before LOCs,” dismissing sentence-level issues unless I noticed patterns of error or local obstructions to clarity. While this stratified approach to writing center sessions worked well for many students, I quickly found—as many of us have—that not all students want or need an exclusive focus on global concerns in order to improve as self-aware, rhetorically savvy writers.
Why weren’t we teaching the medium-specific knowledge that would help each student succeed in their rhetorical composing? When learning in a clay-based medium, I needed to understand at the very least the basic technical aspects: how to wedge the air bubbles out of clay so my piece wouldn’t blow up in the kiln; the properties and application of glaze so as not to damage expensive equipment in firing; or how to throw basic shapes on the potter’s wheel so I could begin to experiment more with my own forms. These examples are not simple cases of “learning the rules before you can break them” to maintain the status-quo; rather, abiding by certain conventions of physics, chemistry, and craft tradition could mean the difference between producing a vitrified ceramic object and opening the kiln to find glaze-damaged shelves and piles of rubble. In sum, I had to understand the medium to produce the artistic outcome I wanted.
Words are a different medium than clay, of course—intangible, shaped first and foremost by society rather than geology. Still, in rhetorical composing, skillful use of words is often integral to successful verbal communication. Yet, whether in my graduate program or in the writing center itself, I had received little formal training on helping writers with sentence-level concerns; these were all seemingly subsumed under a nebulous “grammar” umbrella—or worse, current-traditionalism—and therefore tacitly positioned as the antithesis of rhetoric.
The musings and struggles that I encountered simultaneously in the ceramics studio and the writing center are woven into a larger tapestry of the content-form binary, one in which we separate out synergistic concepts, elevating thinking over doing, message over medium, and creativity over technical skill (see fig. 1). Simply put, LOCs were seen as matters of “craft,” not “art.”
Historical hierarchies
Before revising our approach to the concerns we’ve neglected, I think it important to note where these parallel binaries—i.e. art/craft and HOCs/LOCs—each came from. Both can be contextualized within historical power dynamics, and in both cases, we can read the dominant term (i.e., art and HOCs, respectively) as emerging to defend labor perceived as undervalued or marginalized. The earliest distinctions between art and craft have been dated back to the Italian Renaissance, when makers such as da Vinci and Vasari separated their work from the “manual labor” of guild workers to justify their intellectual labor (Rath 26-28; Risatti, 116). Public art historians remind us that artists at this time operated within a system of patronage; by elevating their status, they sought secure respect and fair compensation for contracted work (Morelli; Harris & Zucker).
Similarly, the division between HOCs and LOCs seems to have emerged in part to justify the intellectual labor of writing center work. In 1984, Stephen North published “The Idea of a Writing Center,” pushing back against misconceptions that “a writing center can only be some sort of skills center, a fix-it shop” (435). The same year, Thomas Reigstad & Donald McAndrew introduced the terms HOCs and LOCs in their guide booklet Training Tutors for Writing Conferences. This division allowed consultants to prioritize certain concerns over others in order to focus on the most “significant problems,” but also to relieve the consultant of “detect[ing] and correct[ing] all the problems” (Reigstad & McAndrew 26, emphasis in original)—a worthy goal, and one we can update in the context of today’s writing center.
A Two-fold Shift
So how do we explore sentence-level pedagogies without reinforcing the age-old misconceptions of our work? I argue that it’s a two-fold shift: first, in how we view the relationship between HOCs and LOCs (perhaps better described as local and global concerns); and second, in training and pedagogical approach. The first shift leads to what I call an embrace of techné; the second, to an embrace of holistic consulting.
Shift 1: Embracing techné
First, we must acknowledge the inherent relationship between form and content. In writing, we simply could not communicate our thoughts without the words on the page. Every word, punctuation, sentence, paragraph, and so forth marks a choice that helps construct and execute the larger concept. Therefore, I suggest a return to the classical concept of techné, what Susan Delagrange describes as an “incorporation of thinking and doing … a productive oscillation between knowledge in the head and knowledge in the hand” (35).
Through a techné framework, writing center stakeholders can begin to see the interdependence of local and global concerns. The metaphor of techné positions writing as neither art nor craft exclusively, but as skillful creative labor, a marriage of thinking and doing. Embracing techné means breaking down the vertical hierarchy of the HOCs/LOCs binary (shown in fig. 1) and replacing it with a model wherein local choices are recognized as collectively constructing a global whole (see fig. 2).
Shift 2: Embracing holistic consulting
This first shift implies a second: a holistic approach to writing consulting. Every writing center session necessarily requires prioritization; writers and consultants simply cannot attend to every choice made within a piece of writing. A HOCs/LOCs framework mitigates this overwhelming challenge by pre-sorting concerns for the consultant, anticipating those which will likely bear the most weight in revision and steering the session away from proofreading. This framework plays the odds, wagering that most writers in most situations will receive the greatest benefits from a big-picture discussion of argument and organization.
While a more detailed and more advanced approach, a techné framework could yield a higher return when applied thoughtfully and creatively. By understanding the paper as an act of synthesis, we can focus on the most salient local instances (the “load-bearing sentences,” if you will) that come together to make a meaningful whole. This framework suggests that the consultant and the writer possess or can develop both the genius and skill (the artistry and craftsmanship) to select, discuss, and reimagine salient global and local decisions.
By providing consultants with a holistic theoretical foundation for their practice, we can above all embrace the writing center as a site for innovative composition pedagogy. As Jesse Kavadlo argues, “A return to language—not just what students are trying to say, but the diction that they use to say it, and the relationship between what they say and how they say it—seems just the sort of balanced approach that one-on-one tutoring and collaboration can foster” (218). When we delve into those concerns relegated as “lower” or “later,” we reimagine the writing center as a studio for medium exploration. I’m excited to see what we make.
Notes
Including big-picture concerns such as “thesis or focus; audience and purpose; organization; and development” (Purdue OWL).
Including concerns such as “sentence structure, punctuation, word choice, [and] spelling.” (Purdue OWL).
works cited
Delagrange, Susan H. Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World. E-book, Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State UP, 2011, https://ccdigitalpress.org/book/wonder/ .
Harris, Beth, & Zucker, Steven. “What makes art valuable—then and now?” Khan Academy, n.d., www.khanacademy.org/humanities/approaches-to-art-history/questions-in-art-history/a/what-made-art-valuablethen-and-now. Accessed 9 Jan. 2020.
Kavadlo, Jesse. “Tutoring Taboo: A Reconsideration of Style in the Writing Center.” Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy, edited by T. R. Johnson & Thomas Pace, Utah State UP, 2005, pp. 215-226.
Morelli, Laura. “What’s the difference between art and craft?” TedEd, Mar. 2014, https://lauramorelli.com/whats-the-difference-between-art-craft/.
North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English, vol. 46, no. 5, 1984, pp. 433-446.
Purdue Online Writing Lab. “Higher Order Concerns (HOCs) and Lower Order Concerns (LOCs).” n.d., https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/mechanics/hocs_and_locs.html, accesed 9 Jan. 2020.
Rath, Pragyan. The “I” and the “Eye”: The Verbal and Visual in Post-Renaissance Western Aesthetics. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
Reigstad, Thomas J. & McAndrew, Donald A. Training Tutors for Writing Conferences. ERIC Clearinghouse/National Council of Teachers of English, 1984, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED240589.pdf.
Risatti, Howard. A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression. University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Appendix A
Figure 1. Hierarchical binaries of art/craft and HOCs/LOCs depicted as similar pyramids.
Figure 2. Local and global choices reciprocally reimagined as doing and thinking, respectively. Note that the big-picture concept or argument (“thinking”) is made up of individual, salient instances of medium-specific execution (“doing”).
