Scott on Graff

Scott’s presentation of Graff’s ideas struck a responsive chord in my experience of composition. In the last couple years, I’ve taken four writing workshops here at CSU-- two in fiction, two in creative nonfiction. All the courses have involved peer review. The stories I read, my own as well as others, are often rambling and unfocused. A person has to write for awhile before he or she begins to see what the story is really about. It often turns out that the first five pages are irrelevant to the resolution of the last page. That resolution is usually unsatisfying because it seems to come out of no where, it hasn’t been developed. Of course, it’s not always the case that the most effective writing appears at the end. The best writing, the clearest and most vivid, can appear anywhere in the body of the text and the story will leave it for things far less interesting. But one thing the resolution or those moments of truly gripping writing do is point to the main conflict. That conflict is the thing that has generated so many muddled, rambling words and images.
Once one knows the conflict, either through the resolution or as a result of contemplating what peers pointed out as the parts that most deeply affected them, the story can be revised to develop the conflict more clearly. The relation of disparate parts of the story can more closely related to the conflict—exactly how to they touch on the conflict in its development through time or theme? Those details which don’t relate can discarded as irrelevant and other details included which do relate to develop the story. In either case, the conflict becomes that point which organizes the piece.
I know this analysis of conflict seems to concentrate on composition theory as if were just a story, a fiction. But I can its relevance to Graff's approach to “academic obscurantism,” a way to approach the postmodern influence on theory to try to find a way to make those theories of relevance in a context where students and teachers actually exist. Argumentation (which necessarily involves focus on a conflict) as a meta-practice can function as well in an internal dialogue as well as a social one. Thanks, Scott, for a very engaged and evocative argument.