PB2B: Moves

Establishing why your claim matters. The conclusions made in Birkenstein and Graff’s ““So What? Who Cares?”-Saying Why it Matters” have a significant application in a student’s college expository writing because they emphasize the need for writers to demonstrate the “even broader relevance and urgency of the subject matter”(53). For example, Birkenstein and Graff say that by “suggesting the real-world applications of your claims, they demonstrate that others care about your claims but also tell your readers why they should care” (54). This concept of including real-world relevance is effective in any genre of writing because it gives the text a sense of purpose.   

Entertaining Objectives. In Peter Elbow’s Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing, he brings in an arguable statement:“You might say that speaking is a better way to enhance creative thinking-either through brainstorming or through the back and forth discussion of debate” (33). Here the author compares speaking to exploratory writing and puts this idea under discussion. He argues that people work more efficiently using the free exploratory writing method due to the availability, where you don’t need an audience to practice speaking.

Indicating who cares: This technique tells the reader who the author is writing for and who might benefit from reading. For example, the findings found in the article The Disciplines of Love, by Julia Nguyen, challenge the work of earlier researchers, who tended to assume that “love is portrayed as an experience that people crave or is something that happens spontaneously.” But recently, biologists suggest that the forces that drive us to want those feelings are related to the chemicals in our brains. This article hints that people in the biological field might find this information resourceful.

Naming your naysayers  In The Disciplines of Love, by Julia Nguyen, she talks about the effectiveness of certain conventions, such as tone, and the way they have a precise effect to a specific area of study. She mentions that in the field of biology, scholars would argue that an objective and straightforward is most efficient in comparison to the method used by communication scholars. This move is one that brings to question the actions of other writers and serves to describe a naysayer who thinks the beliefs of others are flawed.

Capturing authorial action. This move describes how authors use certain sources to strengthen their argument. For example, in How to Read Like a Writer by Mike Bunn, the author mentions the beliefs of famous authors such as David Jauss. Here, Jauss acknowledges that reading won’t help much unless one learns to read like a writer. This helps validate his point about reading while simultaneously trying to figure out how a text is constructed to become successful in ‘reading like a writer.’  

Introducing “Standard View.” Laura Bolin Carroll states in her article Backpacks and Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis: “Chances are you have grown up learning to interpret and analyze these type of rhetoric. They become so commonplace that we don’t realize how often and how quickly we are able to perform this kind of rhetorical analysis” (40). This generalization, or standard view of something recurring in today’s society, is exemplary of the way in which writers come to draw their own conclusions based off of personal experiences that can effectively relate to the experiences of readers to the idea of rhetorical analysis.

The “fun imagery” move is evident in Losh and Alexander’s “Writing Spaces.” Here the authors practice an interesting technique in which they guide the reader through a series of comic strips. This technique helps engage the reader because the images poke fun at the different writing spaces in many different genres of writing through humorous and alluring pictures. Losh and Alexander provide visually entertaining images such as a comparison of two college classrooms, where they describe one as structured and dutiful with a very strict professor and the other as creative and experimental with a easy-going professor.

The “Start with an ‘I’ introduction” move is seen in Peter Elbow’s “Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing” where he talks about the way he ‘celebrates’ freewriting and exploratory writing on the first drafts. This move is also apparent in Janet Boyd’s “Murder! (Rhetorically Speaking)” where she states she is a college professor to appeal to a college audience. This method is effective in relating the audience to the writer because it starts the text as personal and conversational.

The “agree to disagree” move is one where the author expresses different ideas and shows how, although arguable, they work together to give the best results in writing. For example, in “Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing” by Peter Elbow, he expresses how first order thinking leads to more satisfying writing but adds that the “notion of opposite extremes gives a constructive and specific picture of what we’re looking for in good thinking and writing.”

The “I could have just saved time and read the last paragraph” move is seen in How to Read Like a Writer by Mike Bunn and Navigating Genres by Kerry Drik. This move shows how authors write the important take from a reading at the end of the writing. This works to reiterate the main idea as well as to leave the reader with a clear understanding of what had just been read.